2016 Personality Lecture 09: Phenomenology: Heidegger, Binswanger, Boss

So last time, we talked a little bit about the state of the world of belief, I suppose, by the end of the nineteenth century. I talked to you a little about Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard. Um, a very large number of the clinical theories that we’re going to be discussing for another two lectures after this one have been influenced by philosophers, and that's partly why I’m also talking to you about the philosophers. It’s almost as if in some sense the great philosophers have - are tapped directly into the lower strata of our cultural systems of meaning as they move forward in time. They can outline what those structures are and also describe their weaknesses, and their strengths, and their likely transformations moving forward. You know, I mean obviously people can be behind the times, and it’s just as probable that some people are ahead of the times. We would assume, if you're thinking about it, say, from a Big Five trait perspective, that the people who are ahead of the times often are very, very intelligent and very, very open. Of course, that's a pretty good definition of a philosopher.

So, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, more than any other two thinkers, had their finger on the pulse of the transmutation of cultural systems of meaning at the end of the nineteenth century. They were both concerned about the fact that the systems of meaning, within which Western civilization at least had taken shape, had been fragmented for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was likely the rise of the scientific worldview. As I detailed to you in the last lecture, both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche believed that that had left modern people—because I think in the early twentieth century, it was Western people—but I now think it’s reasonable to say that it’s modern people—in a state of cultural discontinuity. The things—belief systems but also technological systems now have transformed the world so radically that the conflict between modernism and traditional forms of belief is acutely felt everywhere.

It’s certainly, I think, one of the forces that have given rise to the battle between Islamic fundamentalism and modernism because it’s more than a battle of Islamic fundamentalism against the Western world. The problem, fundamentally, is that people typically exist within cultural constructs that are very, very ancient and that are grounded in evolved systems of meaning that are even deeper than the ones that are articulated and explicit. When there's a period of very, very rapid cognitive and technological change, then the integrity of those systems starts to become questionable from an explicit perspective. But it also starts to become insufficient from a practical perspective. So, one example that you might give some consideration to is the fact of the introduction of the birth control pill, for example.

If you listen to politically minded people, they make the case that the emancipation of women was essentially a political matter, but I don't think that's a very reasonable way of looking at it at all. Of course, everything feeds back onto itself and there are multiple causal pathways to any end. The radical element in the emancipation of women was of course the development of efficient forms of contraception, most particularly the birth control pill. It’s the case that as soon as you educate women anywhere in the world, not only does economic productivity arise dramatically, in fact, it’s actually the best predictor of increasing economic productivity in a modernizing state is the granting of rights to women.

Now whether it’s directly because of the granting of rights to women or because of the existence of an underlying belief structure that allows the concept of right to expand quite rapidly is very difficult to be sure of, but in any case, that exists. Then of course, the other thing that happens is that women stop having children unbelievably rapidly. For example, I think—I believe it’s Iran where this has been most marked over the last two generations—from family sizes far greater than replacement to family sizes well below replacement in basically one or two generations. It’s a massive transformation, and it’s not necessarily something that anyone expected. It’s part of the sequence of forces that are rapidly allowing our population to reach a peak and either stabilize or decline.

Now I don't know how many of you know this, but the projections are there’ll be nine billion people on the Earth within thirty to fifty years, and that’ll be our peak population. After that, it will fall rapidly, and you know, you can see that sort of thing happening right now all over the Western world. It’s happening a lot in China, and it’s happening a lot in Japan where, you know, there are more older people than there are younger people because the younger people aren't having enough children to actually replace the population. So the probability that we’ll peak at about nine billion and then start to fall is not certain, but that’s what the best projections seem to indicate now.

So what happens anyways within periods of very rapid technological and cognitive transformation is that the certainties upon which people base their interpretation of the world and, even more importantly, base their judgments about how to act start to become uncertain. So for example, if you introduce the birth control pill into a population and you put women’s reproductive faculties under their own voluntary choice, then you radically transform virtually all of society’s fundamental social structures, not least marriage. Marriage, of course, has been regarded classically as the foundation of civilization. Of course, increasingly, there are more people who aren't married than there are people who are married. Now, it’s very difficult to know what to make of that because of course there's no setting the clock back.

It’s not even clear that you would want to set back the clock if you could, but expecting cultural constructs, which take centuries or maybe even thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of years to develop, to keep up with change of that magnitude is...it’s not possible. You know, I mean, and you guys face technological transformations that are earth-shattering on an almost yearly basis, and you hardly even notice it. I mean, Tinder is a good example of that. You know, I don’t know if you know, but Tinder has produced quite a spike in sexually transmitted diseases, but you know, it’s a radical technology because it’s the first technology that’s ever been invented that enables men to find partners with no fear—with virtually no fear of rejection.

Of course, that's been a limiting factor for… that’s been a defining feature between the interactions between men and women ever since history began, and so these things are occurring at an extraordinary rate. Of course, it’s not reasonable to expect our more slower-moving cultural constructs to keep up with them. That’s partly because, as well, that, you know, people talk, for example, about the divisive nature of religion. You often hear people who are critics of formal religion in particular talk about the fact that religion underlies a tremendous amount of destruction and warfare and conflict. You know, first of all, it isn't religion that does that, by the way, it’s tribalism. Tribalism characterizes even chimpanzees, and I don't think chimpanzees go to war with each other for religious reasons.

The religious groupings of mankind are large-scale manifestations of the same phenomena that produce dominance hierarchies in the wild. Of course, large-scale religions unite people within the religion just as much as they divide people on the outside of it. So part of the accumulation of religious tradition across time is a process that allows thousands, and ten thousands, and even millions of people to exist within the same hierarchy of values and exist relatively peacefully as a consequence. Now I’m saying relatively peacefully. You know, a hundred years ago, it was thought that pre, let's say archaic people—so those would be people who are still living a fairly isolated tribal life in small groups—pre, you know, basically operating at the level of Stone Age technology, let’s say.

The idea was—there was a very popular idea for a long time that those cultures were communistic and violence-free, and that's wrong. They're not violence-free at all. If you track the homicide rates in stone-age cultures, they're way, way higher than they are in civilized cultures, like orders of magnitudes higher, and there's a variety of reasons for that. But I’m just telling you that because you want to dispense with the idea that along with complex civilizations and the spread, say, of unifying religious beliefs, there was an increase in baseline violence because there's just no evidence for that at all.

Now, the problem with these large-scale belief systems is they're not very fast. Part of the reason for that is that in order for a large-scale belief system to manifest itself in any reasonable form, it has to be predicated on the mutual agreement of the people within who operate within its embrace. You know, so for Toronto to exist as a city, as a peaceful city, basically what has to happen is that the vast majority of us have to agree that the rules that govern the city and the social interactions within the city are useful and just. Because if you don't agree with that, then splinter movements of all sorts start to occur, and people become more revolutionary in their modes of action, and then they become more violent and the whole system starts to break down.

So it’s not easy to establish a collective norm because people have to agree to it. You can imagine that hammering out agreement with anything, with even a small agreement that affects many, many people is a process that takes a tremendous amount of time. People can argue forever about the smallest alterations in the systems that regulate our behavior. Now, you know, some of you might be familiar with the terror management theories. How many of you have heard of terror management theory? Okay, well the terror management theories are predicated on the idea that our belief systems protect us from our fear of death. Now exactly how they do that isn't specified particularly well in the terror management theories, but the originator of the theory—his name was Ernest Becker, who was a sociologist, by the way, and a Freudian—believed that cultural systems enabled us to attribute beliefs to our actions, finite and infinite, so that we could consider ourselves in relationship to mortality and in some sense, hide from the truth of the finitude of our existence.

Now, one of the things that terror management theorists don't really give any credence to is the fact that belief systems are not only systems of beliefs, they're systems of action regulation, right. So we talked about the Piagetian notion of a game. I mean, the game exists first as something that everyone can play and only later as something that people represent, and a social culture’s the same way. A culture regulates the way that you interact with each other, and what you expect from each, and how you can fulfill your mutual needs in relationship to one another. Then it’s represented, and the representation might help you find meaning in your life. But the fact of the initial social contract, which is the phenomena that regulates your interpersonal behavior, doesn't protect you from the fear of death, it protects you from dying. And that's a very important thing to note.

I mean, you know, all of you know, of course, that it’s very cold out today, and yet here you are in this classroom where it’s, you know, ridiculously comfortable, you know, by classroom standards and of course by standards around the world. You're not freezing to death in here, and that’s not your belief that’s protecting you. It’s the fact that you're embedded in this insanely complicated system of cultural interactions. It just so happens that you get to sit here and listen to a lecture while there's thousands of people beetling around, many of them outside in the cold, making sure that the power grid, for example, that keeps this place warm is properly maintained and functional, which takes a tremendous amount of work.

So, during periods of rapid transformation, it’s hard for the social contract to adjust itself so that everyone knows how to behave in relationship to one another. But then it’s also very difficult for the description of that—so the articulated norms that constitute a society—it's very difficult for them to transform rapidly enough so that they can keep track of the changes and help people decide what they should do. So let me give you an example. I had a client a while back who had been raised as a fundamentalist Christian, and she was very...she had been socialized and had come to believe that sex before marriage was wrong. But the probability that she was going to get married before she was 27 or 28 was low for a whole variety of reasons.

So then she faced this conundrum, and it was an interesting conundrum from my perspective because, you know, I think that in a well-regulated psyche, sexuality is integrated into the personality so that it plays its role in the—what would you call it—in the polity of the self. It’s integrated properly inside, and so it’s under moral control, roughly speaking, because it serves its own function plus the function of keeping the person well-situated in the present and developing properly in the future, and maintaining proper relationships with everyone around them. But it was quite obvious to me that a lot of the constraints that had been placed on her behavior, as a consequence of her relatively rigid belief, were actually interfering with her development as a person, you know.

One of the things we had to puzzle out was well, exactly what are the moral guidelines that you should use to regulate your sexual behavior outside of marriage if you're not planning to be married for, you know, maybe until your late twenties. Well, you know, good luck trying to figure that out. Like it’s a really, really, really, really complicated question, and it’s certainly not obvious that any one person can figure out the answer to that in a single lifetime, you know, even if they thought of nothing else, especially because the landscape itself is transforming as you're attempting to adjust to it. We eventually concluded—although it was a very individual solution—we eventually concluded that there were things that she had forbidden herself to do that were stopping her from establishing any kind of long-term relationship at all, and that was interfering with her development, you know, as a mature person.

The morality that she had used to structure her behavior appeared to be counterproductive, at least in, you know, some areas. So, it’s one thing to, you know, regulate sexuality in the hopes of marriage when you get married when you're, you know, 19 or 20 or 21. It’s a completely different thing, perhaps, when it’s not going to happen until you're in your late twenties. Nietzsche talked a lot, and Dostoevsky talked a lot about the collapse of meaning systems in the late nineteenth century, and you know, that was followed by a very, very rapid period of technological transformation, like that really kicked in in the late 1800s, which was the height of the industrial revolution, particularly in England.

There were modern technologies being thrust out of the industrial revolution like mad, like the automobile, and the airplane, and the electrical light, and the recording devices, and all the things that we’re still elaborating on now. Apart from the collapse of classic, say, Christian belief, and the introduction of all these new technologies, when World War I hit, the entire monarchical structure of the Western world collapsed. That also occurred, say, with regards to the Ottoman Empire, and that was partly what led to the creation of the modern Middle East, and of course, that still hasn't been sorted out to any greater degree at all.

So the monarchical structures collapsed—these ancient civilizations. The Russians underwent their revolution, and were transformed into Communists. After World War I, the stress between the potential different ways of structuring societies after the monarchical societies had collapsed was almost unbearable, and people didn't really know what to do. Now, what happened at the end of Nietzsche’s period and Dostoevsky’s period was that the question that both of those people—what? The most important question both of those people asked became the central focus of the development of the philosophical idea of ethics in the twentieth century. You could think about that as a post-religious ethic.

Now, the reason I’m telling you this is because, among other things, is because a lot of what psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic treatment is about is about ethics. That can't be stretched too much because ethics is about how you see the world and how you behave. Even behaviorists who are technically embedded in the scientific world are still practical ethicists because what they're consistently doing with their clients is breaking down whatever the problems are that are causing them misery, breaking them down into sub-problems and trying to figure out solutions that improve their quality of life—like practical, implementable solutions that improve their quality of life not only now, but as they propagate into the future. That is not a scientific issue. It’s a how-to-live issue.

So, the entire history of the twentieth century, in some sense, political, economic, psychological, was a sequence of attempts to answer the question of “When your fundamental systems of ethics collapse, how is it that you should live?” Now, Nietzsche said very clearly that there’d be two consequences to the collapse of these systems. One would be nihilism—the belief in nothing at all—which he also regarded as a form of escape from responsibility. So it’s a logical consequence of the breakdown of classical belief systems, but it’s also a cop-out, and it’s the kind of cop-out that Dostoevsky explored very deeply in his small, brilliant novel, “Notes from Underground,” which describes a person who’s basically slipped—an intelligent person, and an irresponsible person—who has basically slipped into a pit of meaninglessness where he experiences hatred and resentment and the desire for revenge, and all of the sorts of things that would afflict someone in the underworld who’s got nothing to hold them together.

Then of course, Nietzsche also talked about the likelihood that people would turn to totalitarian belief systems, and he particularly discussed Communism as a replacement for religious belief. I can give you a Canadian example of that. So, I heard a Gallup pollster one time— I was at a conference in Ottawa—it’s the only time I’ve ever heard this, and I think it’s an amazing—it’s an amazing fact. They were looking at the probability that people would be separatists in Quebec, and if you were a lapsed Catholic, the probability that you would be a Separatist was increased ten times. The reason for that is, you know, Catholicism fell apart in Quebec in the late 1950s. It was one of the last places in the Western world, roughly speaking, where the feudal, in some sense, structures of Catholicism had maintained themselves right up to that point.

Right up to the 1950s, the late 1950s, and that collapsed precipitously just like belief in Christianity had in Russia, you know, in the late, say, 1880s. What happened in Quebec was, well first of all, the birth rate plummeted. I mean, I did genetic research in Quebec and in the 1950s and before that, it was very typical to see families of nine to thirteen children. Of course, now Quebec has the lowest birth rate, I believe, in the Western world. It’s way below replacement. Everybody bailed out of the church. Nobody gets married, and if you were a separatist—if you were a lapsed Catholic—you were ten times more likely to be a separatist.

All that meant was that when Catholicism fell apart, you know, people who still needed to have very structured belief systems just turned to Nationalism as a natural alternative. That’s part of what accounted for the rigidity and the utopian nature of the Quebec movement towards independence. You know, I remember talking to one of my colleagues—a very, very intelligent person—and you know, I asked him because at that point, they were predicting that if Quebec separated, the Canadian dollar would fall to forty cents, forty-five cents US, something like that. It’d be a complete economic catastrophe. I said, well you know, the predictions are that if Canada separates, or Quebec separates—and no one would know how to do that—that the Canadian economy will collapse, and of course, that’ll collapse the Quebec economy too.

He didn't deny that. He said, yeah, but it would be worth it. I thought, well there's just no way of having a conversation under those circumstances because from my perspective, total— you know, severe economic collapse is a good reason not to do something. If you believed that the future potential is such that that’s justified, then well, there's no arguing with you. It’s just something that’s decided, and that’s the end of that. When I lived in Quebec, as I did for a long time, I learned very quickly never to have a discussion about politics with anyone who was a separatist because it was just absolutely counterproductive, you know. They had axioms of belief that weren't movable, like the future will be good enough so that no matter what price we pay in the present, that will be justified.

It’s like, well that's not an idea right. It’s a statement of faith. You saw exactly the same thing happening—not with the same principles, I’m not saying that—but you saw the same thing happening from a psychological perspective in Russia when the Communists really started to become active in the 1920s when any matter of horror whatsoever was fully justifiable because it was going to bring about some future state that was basically equivalent to paradise. So, anyways, Dostoevsky pursued the idea of nihilism even farther. Dostoevsky was certainly someone who was willing to go to the ends of an argument, and one of the things he proclaimed was that if there was no god, then anything was permitted.

His basic hypothesis was, well, if there's no ultimate arbiter of values—if there's no transcendent arbiter of values—then you're radically free. Now, you know, the existentialists would say you could use that radical freedom to find meaning in your life. But one of the things Dostoevsky realized was that you could use that radical freedom for anything that you wanted. So in his book “Crime and Punishment,” for example, he explores the actions and beliefs of a student who was named Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov is a starving student. He’s a law student, and he doesn't have enough to eat. So of course, his cognition is a little bit on the addled side because he’s going through periods of starvation and drunkenness, so it’s not like he’s thinking that clearly. He wants to become a law student so that he can help society.

He finds out that his sister is basically willing to enter into a loveless marriage and more or less prostitute herself so that she can generate enough money to share with her mother so that they can fund his continuation through law school, and he thinks that wouldn't be a very good deal. At the same time, he’s indebted to a pawnbroker whom everyone hates, who’s an absolutely miserable person in every possible way. Dostoevsky sets up the situation like that. So the pawnbroker has a niece, if I remember correctly, whom she basically enslaves and mistreats. She squirreled away all sorts of money but never does anything with it, lives in absolute poverty, and anyways, he considers her the sort of person without whom the world would be a better place. So having all these things co-occurring in his imagination, he decides that because there are no ultimate arbiters of value, that all morality is essentially cowardice—which is kind of the reverse of what Nietzsche concluded.

He said most people were cowardly and justified that with their morality. But Raskolnikov took the other idea, which is, “Well why do I have to obey any rules at all? If there’s no ultimate source for all of these rules, it’s just convention and cowardice, and if I have enough strength then I could leap outside of that framework and I can do whatever I want.” So he decides to kill the pawnbroker, which he does, and quite successfully. Not only that, he gets away with it, and that's about the first third of “Crime and Punishment.” The rest of the book is the discussion of the manner in which he comes unglued as a consequence of having performed this act. It’s a brilliant—an absolutely brilliant study of the way that a value system holds you together, even in ways that you don't know.

If you step outside of that and violate your relationship to it in some really intense way, then there's going to be catastrophic psychological consequences that’ll echo through your whole being. We know that this is more than theory because many people, soldiers in particular, who develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) develop PTSD when they observe themselves doing something that they regard as tremendously cruel, or vicious, or immoral. You know, they find themselves in a situation where, you know, acting in that manner is highly probable. It’s a war situation. It’s usually very intense, and you know, they don't have a lot of time to make decisions, and god only knows, you know, what the specifics are of the particular event. Many, many people come to be so shattered by observing themselves do things they can't believe that a human being would be capable of doing that they never recover.

It’s partly because, you know, they violate their ethical—the ethical structure that holds them together, holds all their ideas, their plans, their perceptions, and their interactions with other people. That's a unifying field in some sense, and if you violate it and it fragments, then you're left absolutely fragmented. That’s not even a psychological observation; it’s a psychophysiological observation. You can stress yourself so badly, raise your stress levels so high that your brain starts to become damaged by the stress hormone. You know, it’s not just a psychological state; it’s damage to the core of your being in some sense.

Now, the collapse of these belief systems and their destabilization was well thought through by these thinkers by the end of the nineteenth century. Then we have the technological transformations and the sociological and political transformations of the early part of the twentieth century that leave everyone in a state of confusion, in some sense. Like in Germany in the 1920s. Of course, the Germans had gone through this terrible period of trench warfare, so all their men were brutalized. Some of them had been on the front for months, and that was in the trenches. Their political system had collapsed and they put a weakly rooted democracy in place. The economic system collapsed, and Germany went through a period of hyperinflation so that the value of their money basically dropped to zero. That meant if you were 65 years old and saved up your whole life to have enough money to retire—and you were a good citizen, you know, and prudent and careful—every single thing you ever owned disappeared.

At the same time, you know, the Communist revolution had taken place in Soviet Russia, and there was great concern within Germany that the same thing was likely to happen there. Certainly the Communists were always pushing for that because they had the Comintern, which is the international Communist movement that was devoted to destabilizing, you know, non-Communist governments and producing the preconditions for the revolution. It wasn't like it was just paranoia; it was a real threat. It was out of all that mess that came the emergence of the fascists and the Nazis. It’s not that surprising because chaos breeds the desire for order.

So that was one direction that people could go. You know, instead of following some abstract Messiah, let’s say, the sort of idea that was embedded in classical Christianity, they realized a new Messiah, and that was Hitler. That certainly didn't seem to be any improvement, you know, because Hitler was really a messiah of destruction and fire. The World War II killed about a hundred and twenty million people, and of course, it left Germany in absolute ruins. Hitler killed himself in his bunker underneath Berlin while it was burning and the Russians were advancing into Germany, and they were not happy. You didn't want to be a German national while the Soviets were advancing towards you after your country had invaded theirs, pushed them back halfway across the Soviet Union, producing a tremendous amount of damage and distress.

It was an awful situation, you know, and the messiahs that the Russians turned to—Lenin and Stalin—were barbaric and brutal beyond comprehension. You know, it’s a strange thing; we’re not very well educated in what happened in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. We know far more about what happened in Germany, say, with the Holocaust. You know, it’s very important that people should know about that, but there were tens of millions of people brutally destroyed in the Soviet Union. Partly because they were murdered by people who were, at least in principle, motivated by left-wing utopian visions. We seem to... our education system seems to regard that as somehow more forgivable, which it certainly isn't.

So, the whole generate secular alternatives to religious belief issue didn't seem to work out very well, and then the nihilism alternative—well that has its own problems. One problem is the sort that Dostoevsky talked about. You know, you see the kids who go up and shoot up high schools and explode in rage. You know, they're often people who feel that they have no meaning in their life, that life itself is contemptible, and that suffering is too extreme and that they bear the brunt of unfair reality. They develop unbelievably dark and destructive theories of revenge and mayhem over, sometimes over the period of years, and then they go out in the world and lay those things out.

It’s not like their thinking is irrational, you know. It’s coherent. It’s just predicated on principles that you might not agree with, such as, you know, the principle that “everyone I don’t like deserves to die.” But you know, in the absence of a really formal way of demonstrating that such thoughts are not only immoral but wrong, you know, in some absolute sense, it’s very difficult to come up with ways of defending ourselves against those two extremes. You know, the extreme of destructive nihilism and the extremes of ideological possession.

Now, Nietzsche started to work out some solutions to this. I just started to touch on those at the end of the last lecture. Dostoevsky’s solution was a return to Christianity, fundamentally, and its revivification. That was the same tact that Alexander Solzhenitsyn attempted to lay out, and also Tolstoy in Russia, you know, and I’ll talk to you about that a little bit more in the next lecture. Dostoevsky—or Nietzsche’s idea was that people would have to... he said, you know, in his quote about the death of God that people would have to become like gods just to be able to tolerate the consequences of this dismemberment of the previous civilization.

He believed, well, his thinking on this, I would say, is somewhat fragmentary. I mean, Nietzsche was a great critic of Christianity—institutionalized Christianity—and a great diagnostician. He could say what was rotten at the core of Western civilization, we’ll say modern civilization, but when it came to actually describing what to do about it, well, he didn't live that long. You know, he died a fairly young man. There's actually a video of Nietzsche in the mental hospital online. I just found it the other night. I had no idea that he was ever captured on video, but there's video from—movie from about 1899 showing him in a mental hospital where he ended up in his early forties.

He talked about the development of the being he called the overman, which is often translated as superman. His idea was that people would have to take onto themselves the burden of creating new systems of meaning and new moralities that were suited to them—that they would have to create new values. Now, Jung took Nietzsche’s diagnosis very, very seriously, and you can certainly say that Jung was as much influenced by Nietzsche as he was by Freud, and I would say in some ways, he was influenced more. One of the things that Jung was trying to do was to identify where the lost values had gone.

So the Nietzschean idea is that it’s possible for human beings to create their own values. Now, there's a problem with that, and there's a variety of problems with that, and one is that it doesn't seem exactly true in that, you know, a lot of the existentialists who followed Nietzsche, like Jean-Paul Sartre for example, believed in the radical freedom of human beings—that we were doomed to be free, in a sense—and that it was absolutely necessary for us to conjure up our own meanings and values because fundamentally, we face the void and, you know, life was nasty, and brutish, and short to use Hobbes’s terms, and that we had to be able to confront that and live despite it.

Well, there's a variety of problems with that solution. The first one is, well, if you come up with your systems of values, there's no reason—and I come up with mine—there’s no reason to assume that they're going to be sufficiently integrable so that we don't have to fight each other to the death. That's a big problem. So, you know, you have every single person with their own system of beliefs. Well, fine, except how do—in a sense, that's a structured kind of philosophical anarchy. Well, okay, maybe that's good if you happen to live alone on an island, but if you're stuck with all these other people, then that becomes a very difficult thing to manage.

I think it’s partly for that reason that Sartre famously said, “Hell is other people.” You know, because he thought of the other, in some sense, that which was not him—as a suppressive force that stopped him from manifesting his destiny in the way that would have been best for him. Well, you know, hell might be other people, but that doesn't mean that—first of all that's a very one-sided way of looking at things because, of course, hell is other people. Hell is you too, and you know, hell is nature. There are lots of places that you can find hell, but by the same token, you know, the most meaningful elements of people’s lives are often in their social relationships. You can't lay everything at the door of pathological society, you know, and we shouldn't forget as well that Sartre didn’t... what—come up with any reasonable critique of the Communists until the late 1960s.

You know that was a little late. People with any sense, like George Orwell, had figured out that the whole Soviet experiment had become radically murderous by the early 1940s. So Sartre, you know, proposed radical freedom as the existential response to the unveiling of no meaning, but when it came right down to it, he couldn't resist identification with a totalitarian structure so I don't see any reason why we should really pay any attention to what he had to say.

Now there's another problem with the idea that people should create their own values, and that is that it’s not so simple. The problem seemed to be that you don't obey yourself very well. You know, you can say, “Well here’s my code. I’m going to live by it.” Let’s do that simply to begin with. You say, “Well I’m going to study very hard and do well at my classes,” just for the sake of argument, you know, but you don't. You know, you procrastinate, and you have a paper you're supposed to read, and you know you're supposed to read it for reasons that are hypothetically important to you, but there's no damn way you can get yourself to sit down and read it.

Your attention wanders, and you go do three or four stupid things, and you feel terrible about it, like you feel like you're betraying yourself, and maybe this is a continual pattern in your life. One of the things you find out is that you don't get to create your own damn values because, for some reason, you're not in charge of yourself. Of course, that's where the psychoanalytic idea started to come from. You know, Freud notices—this is in the aftermath of Nietzsche—that you're not the master of your own psyche. You know that there's many sub-yous inside of you and that they don't all want the same thing.

The idea that you can generate your own meaning is very—it’s an insufficiently developed idea because there are a lot of meaning-making generators residing within you, and not only do they not all point in the same direction, which is a huge problem, but they don't even necessarily lay themselves out in some integrated fashion across time, and they don't necessarily operate together in a way that's going to enable you to find your place with other people and in society. So, you know, make your own meaning. Well, which part of you? You know, you're not a unified thing. So that's a big problem.

These other problems just remain unaddressed completely. Well, one answer to that, and this is the answer that the more radical existentialists took is that well, society has to be reconfigured. But you know, we kind of know where that leads too. When people are doing radical societal reconfiguration, at least as far as we’ve been able to tell, most of the time that’s an absolute, murderous catastrophe. So, you know, it seems reasonable to me to presume that those experiments have already been run.

Alright, so now Jung, like Dostoevsky, was very interested in returning to sources of meaning from which he believed that our original religious ideas had emerged, and this is partly his notion of the collective unconscious. You know, part of the radical critique of religious systems is predicated on the idea that there's something like conscious beliefs. There are articulated beliefs that you could lay out in a credo, but that's not right. It doesn't seem to be correct at all, and Nietzsche actually knew this. He knew that a lot of our social institutions had emerged from the bottom up and had only become articulated after they had been embodied and danced out essentially.

A tribal group learns how to organize itself over thousands and thousands of years of trial and error, pushing against each other, and they come into that tribal grouping with a biological substrate. Their sociological and political interactions are constrained by all of those things, and then maybe they come up with a description of that over time, a self-description, and an articulated representation, and that's the religious system. It’s not that the religious system is thought out first, as a system of metaphysical presuppositions, images, and dreams, then turned into rules, then imposed on the population who then obey. Generally speaking, when people criticize formal religion, they criticize it assuming that that's how it developed.

You know, and that's kind of a Marxist idea, for example, that religion is the opiate of the masses. The religious structures were laid out so that a small elite could control the population. Now, you know, in virtually every domain, a small elite emerges that dominates the population. I don't care what domain you look at. So Marx is accurate in that way, in that, you know, there's always a power imbalance between elite minority and a non-elite majority. But to say that that's the cause of all the systems that people interact within is, well, it’s unsophisticated beyond belief.

What it does is that it takes phenomena that are complex beyond comprehension and reduce them to one thing. It’s not helpful. Here’s an example. If you sampled popular songs on YouTube, let’s say you made a graph of how popular songs were. What you find is that about ten songs at any given time are played—half of all the songs played at any given time are going to be one of ten songs. Well, and then what the other thing you’d find is that half of all songs played are played by one or more of ten musicians, and that's true no matter if you look all the way from the 1930s to now if you look at popular music. You see the same thing. Almost everything that almost everyone listens to is created by very few people, and then there's millions of musicians, but you've never heard of most of them. You'll never hear a song from most of them.

It’s a small minority, and what you see is in any field of creative production, this happens. A small elite emerges and dominates the entire landscape. Now, you know, it would be kind of ridiculous to assume that the ten most popular singers and musicians that are currently operative were those who gave rise to the system that allowed them to thrive. I mean, obviously that's a dopey idea. It’s no more an intelligent idea when you look at any other domain where there's tremendous variation and the emergence of an elite. It’s a very common phenomenon. It happens, as I said, it happens anywhere there's creative production.

That’s why one percent of the people, you know, roughly, have fifty percent of the money. It’s no different in other creative domains. Now, we’ll talk later in the course about why that happens, but to think it’s because those people set up the system so that they could thrive is—well there's an element of that, obviously because once you're rich, you're going to prefer political policies that help you stay rich, but that doesn't mean you set up the whole damn system that made you rich to begin with. Besides, it’s not the same people over any reasonable span of time. So, the one percent of people who have most of the money, it’s always one percent. But it’s not the same people, you know. Each individual tends to hold on to money for very short periods of time, and big companies don't last very long. You know, they last on average about 30, 35, 40 years, and that's it.

Then they disappear. So, it’s because, you know, the economic landscape is just churning like mad. It’s very difficult for a company to—you know, there aren't that many big steam coach companies anymore, you know, and nobody makes zeppelins, and nobody makes typewriters. You know what I mean, things move quick. Just because you dominated the landscape at one particular moment doesn't mean you're going to be able to do it at the next. Alright, so the create your own meaning thing is a rough one. Then there's another problem too, which is “What makes you think you have enough time?”

You know, lots of times people come to me and they have relationship problems, and part of the problem is that they've set their relationships up outside of social norms. They do that, so they'll say something to me like, well, we’re not going to get married because marriage is just a piece of paper. Which is really a stupid thing to say, like it’s an incredibly stupid thing to say. But underneath that, there's this idea that they want to remain free of social constraints so that they can negotiate their own way. You could give them credit, you know, for wanting freedom instead of just escaping responsibility.

But the problem with that is, it’s like, okay good luck. Try it. I don't know why you would assume that you have enough time in the thirty or forty years that you're going to be pursuing relationships to actually figure out how they should run. You don't have a hope of that. It’s worse too because very, very few people can negotiate. You know, here's the way it works. You either adhere to the social order or you stand outside it. As soon as you stand outside of it, you're in a chaotic place because there's no guidelines. Then you either live chaotically because there's no guidelines or you start to formulate order. But to do that, you have to know what you want, and you have to know how to express it.

Then you have to figure out what your partner wants and then help them express it, and then you have to negotiate a solution. Well, I would say one in twenty people know how to negotiate. It’s really, really difficult. I mean, just think of the steps. First of all, you have to know what you want, and then you have to admit it to yourself. Well, yeah right, like you're not even gonna get to the first one in all likelihood. What do you want? A lot of what you want can't even be articulated, you know. I’ll give you an example.

So, there's a great study done a while back on prediction of relationship longevity. Okay, so here was the question. “How many negative interactions do you have to have per set of positive?”—sorry—“How many positive interactions, per negative interaction, do you have to have with your partner in order for the relationship to remain stable?” Okay, so let’s say you have one negative interaction to every one positive. Okay, or maybe you have ten negatives to every positive. Then you can imagine a different situation where you have a hundred positives to one negative, right? Spanning the whole potential continuum, and you use that to predict relationship satisfaction and longevity.

Well, you might think, well god obviously, a hundred positive to one negative is where the preferable ratio, and so it’s those people who, you know, whose relationship is nothing but constant compliments, bliss. They're the ones who last. It’s not true. What you see is that there's an optimal... an optimal ratio domain. If it falls below five to one positive to negative, then your relationship falls apart. It’s too negative, and it’s partly because people feel negative emotion more than they feel positive emotion. Because you can be hurt more than you can be pleased, and so one that's only five to one is too punishing, and people won't stay in it. But if you get above to eleven to one, it gets not punishing enough, and then you think, well what does that mean exactly?

Well, what do you want in a relationship? Well you think, bliss. It’s like, that isn't what you want, as it turns out. It’s more like you want someone to contend with, you know. You don't want a pushover. You don't want everything just to be easy, you know. This is the sort of phenomena that Kierkegaard was talking about when he talked about deciding to make things more difficult for people because that's what they need. You know this perfectly well because if you go outside with someone and they worship you, and they dote on your every word, and there's nothing but positive feedback coming from them, you lose respect for them almost instantly, and you go wander off and find someone who's more interesting.

Part of the reason for that, I think, is that you want the person that you're with to challenge you so that not only do you do reasonably well day to day together, so that you can coexist in the same space with a reasonable amount of peace, but you also want there to be enough tension in the relationship so that you're both involved in a process of mutual transformation. Well, try specifying that in an articulated way, you know. Good luck. You know, and it also explains strange things about people like the fact that they'll stay in pretty negative relationships. Like, what the hell are you doing there? If you’d articulated it two years ago, and you said, “Well I want to be with someone I’m miserable with half the time,” of course, you're never going to say that.

But it could easily be that that's what you're after. So well, so alright now, Heidegger is another philosopher who was attempting in some sense to solve the problems that were laid out by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The way that Heidegger began to resolve them was by taking a radically new look at philosophy itself, and he was one of the prime phenomenologists. I told you a while back that the phenomenologists decided to reconstitute Western philosophy so that it was focusing on being instead of knowledge. The hardest thing to grasp about the phenomenologists is what exactly they meant by being.

So I’ll give you an overview of that. So that's where the term “da sein” comes from, and that's a German term that means “being there.” So right now, you're encapsulated in a da sein, and the da sein is the totality of your experience. That experience would be an experience of an extended world—the natural world—and then the social world, and then inside that, the world of your subjective experience, and that constitutes being. The phenomenologists make the case—they're not playing the subject-object game—they're standing outside the division between subject and object that's part of the scientific worldview.

It’s a real paradigm shift in that you can't use the rules from the old way of looking at things inside the new way of looking at things. You have to start with new presuppositions. One of the things that you're going to do if you look at things phenomenologically is to assume that everything that you experience is real. We would say that there's no attempt, in a phenomenological world, to reduce pain to something material. Pain stands as—stands itself as a phenomena. So does anxiety. So does joy. All the things that the scientists of consciousness call qualia, which are viewed by them as qualities of the objective world, aren't viewed that way by the phenomenologists.

They just say those are primary elements of being. It’s a very interesting way of looking at things because it kind of allows you to reclaim the validity of your own experience. You can no longer say, “well that’s only subjective.” Now that doesn't mean that everything you claim subjectively is true, objectively or for other people. What it does mean is that everything that you experience subjectively is real. Now that doesn't mean you have to not think about it or take it apart or categorize it properly; you still have to do all of those things. But you're put into a place where there's no need to deny the reality of your own experience or to subordinate it to something else.

If I’m doing dream analysis with someone, which I do often, if people dream—because dreams, as Jung pointed out, are… they're manifestations of being. You don't come up with them. They appear to you. They sort of appear out of nowhere, in some sense. They manifest themselves. They do it strangely, and I think the reason for that is that they contain unarticulated thought. But if you can get a handle on them and assess them, then sometimes they can tell you things that there's no other way you can figure out.

What's really cool about them is that they have the same personality as phenomena in the broader world of experience have. You don't ever think about the truth of a chair. It’s just there, and dreams are like that. They're just there, and if you can untangle what they have to—what they indicate, then you can get a take on your own experience that's not altered by any of your local subjective wishes and desires. I hate to use the word subjective in this sort of context. So, phenomenology is the study of being.

Now, in being, there are various aspects. So one aspect—I’ve never remembered the names of these, but I’ll get it here right away. Oh yes. Heidegger broke the world of experience, being, into three basic categories. There was the umwelt, which I think is basically the world beyond culture and the individual. There's the mitwelt, and that's the world that we share with everyone else, so that's roughly the social world and the social structures. Then there's the eigenwelt, which is that domain of experience that's unique to you—that other people can't partake in.

So those are the elements of being, as far as the phenomenologists were concerned. In those domains of being, different experiences manifest themselves. We talked about some of the ones that would be manifestations of the eigenwelt. Scientists would call those things emotional or motivational states. Normally, people think of them as feelings. I would say, “I feel thus. I feel such and such,” and those are experiences that manifest themselves to you or that you have, depending on how you look at it, that are indicative of the manner in which you act in relationship to being.

Now, one of the reasons that this is relevant to psychotherapy in particular is that the phenomenologists were very interested in the manifestation of meaning. So you could say, well, nihilism is the absence of meaning, and totalitarianism is the fixedness of meaning. Right? If you're a totalitarian, what you do is say, “All meanings exist in relationship to this structure.” It’s almost as if the phenomenologists would say you're trying to reduce the umwelt, which is the natural world, the mitwelt, which is the social world, and the eigenwelt, which is your own world. You're trying to reduce all of that to the mitwelt so that everything falls under an explanation that's granted to you by some higher authority.

Then of course, the nihilists are having none of that. They use their eigenwelt, I would say, their own world to invalidate meaning in any domain. Now the phenomenologists would say, well it’s a mistake to use your rationality to undermine the sense, the manifestation of meaning. I can give you an example of that. So let’s say you're a good nihilist, and you think maybe you're going to do something difficult like put yourself through university, and then you think, in a relatively depressed state of mind, maybe you encounter some obstacles of one form or another, and you think, “Oh to hell with this. Who’s—what difference does it make, anyways? Who cares if I go and get my degree? None of this knowledge is particularly relevant or meaningful, and who the hell’s gonna know the difference in a million years?”

You think, well that's a perfectly rational dismissal because who is gonna know in a million years or let’s say, well even if you can make the case that someone might know, there might be some effects left of you in a million years. Then we’ll just multiply it by a hundred thousand and go to a trillion years. So here you are, you're this little tiny speck on a slightly bigger speck in the middle of a galaxy that has god only knows how many billion stars. There’s a billion of those galaxies, although there’s way more than that, and they're spread across this tremendous expanse of time. In the face of all that, who cares what you do?

Well, what a phenomenologist would say is, okay, let’s look at how meaning manifests itself when you alter your own private world in a variety of manners. So let’s say you're trying to do something—maybe you're working in a hospital helping sick kids. You’re reading to them so that they're distracted from their pain, and you say, well in a trillion years, who’s gonna know the difference? You think, well it’s meaningless to do this. The phenomenologists would say, if the frame of reference that you're using—like if you're transforming the way your being manifests itself so that it becomes meaningless and absurd, then you should try experiencing it in a different manner.

A rationalist, in some sense, the phenomenologists would say— a rationalist can't deal with the argument “What difference is it going to make in a trillion years, and here you are, a little dust speck among all these other dust specks? It’s ultimately meaningless.” A phenomenologist would say, “Maximize the meaning. That's the marker of truth.” It’s a completely different way of thinking about it. He would say, for example, that if you're going to a hospital and you're reading to sick children, the frame of reference that you should use, the way that you allow that experience to manifest itself, should be such that the experience manifests itself so that it’s as meaningful as possible rather than as meaningless.

The idea being that just because you can twist your own experience so that certain elements of your being become meaningless does not mean that that’s right. The fact that it becomes meaningless actually means that it’s wrong because you think, you see, it all depends on what you allow to be primary, and this is the phenomenologist's point. If you allow your strict rationality to be primary, then if it can attack something and destroy it, then that thing is worthy of being attacked and destroyed. But if you flip it around and say, well what you should be doing is allowing—is interacting with your experience or allowing your experience to manifest itself in a manner that situates you most meaningfully in the here and now, whatever framework you're using to do that that works is right.

Well, it’s a completely different way of looking at things, and it’s a real—it's a real escape from the pathology of rationalism, you know, because it isn't obvious that what you think should take priority. The phenomenologists would go farther than that. They would say that—and this is something... so here's a way of thinking about it. So Binswanger said, “What we perceive are first and foremost”—Binswanger was a psychiatrist who was very much influenced—Binswanger and Boss are the people we’re going to talk about mostly—were very much influenced by Heideggerian ideas. They say, “What we perceive are first and foremost not impressions of taste, tone, smell, or touch, not even things or objects, but meanings.”

Okay, so the idea for the phenomenologists is that what being is made out of is meaning. It isn't that the objective world is made out of things; it’s that being is made out of meaning. Some of those meanings can be positive, and some of them can be negative, and some of them can be neutral. The fundamental constituent element of being is meaning. There is an argument between Binswanger and Boss about how that meaning manifests itself. So Binswanger would say that “You endow meaning on the world.” That's kind of a Nietzschean idea, that you create your own values, so you have within you something that he called an a priori ontological structure.

It’s a world designer, a matrix of meaning that determines how the world manifests itself to you. The easiest way to think about that is that, you know, you're thrown into a particular time and place—that's another existential idea—and that's part of the absurdity of your life, is that you're here, now, in this particular context and situation. It’s something you have to contend with, and that's true for everyone. There are arbitrary preconditions to everyone’s being, and one of those arbitrary preconditions is the structure through which you look at the world. That structure enables some things to be highlights and some things to be ignored.

So the way that meaning manifests itself is a reflection of this a priori ontological structure, the a priori mode of being. There can't be being, which is to say your experience, for the sake of argument, without the structure that consists of—that you consist of, and so that's a given. It’s the action of that structure that determines the meaning of things. Now, Boss would say exactly the opposite. He would say, that's the wrong way of looking at it. You should look at the totality of your existence, which is partly the broad natural world, the cultural world, and your own world, and you should note that meaning arises in different places of its own accord.

You can't reduce it to the action, say, of this ontological a priori ontological structure. One example would be, well what about the meaning of things you don't understand? Well it’s hard to understand how the meaning of things you don't understand can be attributed to what you understand. The meaning seems to be there, to begin with. So here's an example. You have a relationship with someone, and you discover that they have an affair. The discovery of the affair is going to be something that's going to be meaningful. Now, you don't know what the meaning is. You're going to interpret it to begin with, likely very negatively, except to the degree that part of you would like to escape out of the relationship, right?

Because sometimes if you're betrayed, you're happy about it because it’s time for that to be over with. In any case, there are things that you can encounter that you don't understand that are meaningful in and of themselves. So, I think that you actually can't separate your structure from the structure of everything. They’re always interacting, and meaning emerges out of the interplay of them. Here’s another way of thinking about it. You're reading a book. The book is meaningful. Where is the meaning? Is it in your head? Is it in the book?

Well, it’s very difficult to say, right? Because obviously there's a subjective element to it. There's an element that's unique to you, but just as obviously, that meaning wouldn't manifest itself if it wasn't for the book. Of course, the book wouldn't be meaningful if you and the book weren't embedded in this complex structure. The meaning is an emergent property—the meaning is an emergent property of the interplay of all of the elements of being. That's a very interesting way of looking at things. So you have all these elements of being, and their dance produces meaning of one form or another.

You might say, if you were a phenomenologist, that some of that meaning is going to be life-sustaining, and some of it is going to be life-destroying. The phenomenologist would say from a clinical perspective, that you’re—if you exist in a system of meaning revelations that are life-destroying, that you should turn your attention away from them towards meanings that are life-affirming. You know, one of the things that’s quite interesting about the phenomenological perspective is that you could experiment with it quite easily.

So I could say to you, for example, a couple of phenomenological experiments. One would be, for the next two weeks, you want to detach yourself in some sense, so that you're a curious observer of your being. You're not necessarily trying to direct it. You know, you're just trying to let it unfold, and then what you might want to watch for is when the meaning that manifests itself as things flow around you is clearly the meaning of the life-affirming type. Now you’ll see that, you know, it depends on how well-situated you are in some sense because if you're— if your experiential field is primarily negative, these are going to be relatively rare events. But they will still not be non-existent. That might only happen for a few seconds or a few minutes every day or every two days.

But say you notice all of a sudden that you're in a place where things are the way you would like them to be. You could say you're in a place where being is manifesting itself as acceptable. Okay, so that's a place where nihilism is not appropriate. It doesn't apply because the quality of the experience is such that it’s life-affirming. You have to notice that. It’s something that happens, and then you might ask yourself, well okay, what are the preconditions that enable that? What are the preconditions that enabled all of the different subelements of being to work harmoniously together at that time and place so that that was the meaning that emerged?

Then the next question might be, how would it be possible for me to allow that to happen more frequently? You can tilt yourself towards life-affirming meanings and away from, say, meanings that are associated with despair and nihilism, but you do that partly—it's almost like you're navigating in a boat. In fact, I think you are. I think you're navigating to find the line between order and chaos because that's where the meaning is. That's exactly where the meaning is, and you could feel it like it’s a place, and that's the other thing that phenomenologists are trying to get across. These things are real. They're not secondary manifestations of some deeper reality. They are reality itself.

I also think, and we’ll talk about this more when we get to the neuropsychological portion of the course, that your brain is actually set up first and foremost to detect meaning. You detect meaning before you detect object, and it’s partly because you have to detect meaning so that you know what to do when something happens very rapidly. There are times when you have to figure out what to do before you have enough time to even see what’s there. You just don't have the time. Part of the question is, well, what exactly do you mean by meaning? You know, I think meaning is significance for behavior or significance for the structure that governs behavior.

But those are very, very basic fundamental perceptions. They're not—you see the object, and then you derive the meaning. It’s exactly the opposite in many cases. You perceive the meaning and derive the object, and there's plenty of neurophysiological evidence for that. For example, you have lots of—your retina is a pattern detector, and the retinal information is transmitted to your brain along the optic nerve, but the optic nerve branches and it goes lots of places in your body. Some of it maps right onto your spinal cord so that your eyes can make your body move. Some of it maps onto your amygdala so that what you perceive are the meanings of facial expressions, without even perceiving the face.

You can have people who have blindsight, a damaged visual cortex; you can show them angry faces which they say they can't see, but they'll respond to them electrophysiologically as if they're being exposed to something negative. It’s because the retinal pattern is manifesting itself right onto the system that maps one form of meaning. You can clearly have meaning without object perception, and so the idea that you derive the meaning from the object—you see the thing, and then you attribute meaning to the thing—that's right at some levels of analysis, but it’s wrong at many other levels of analysis.

The other thing that I think that you can try that’s phenomenologically informed—this is quite an interesting trick. It’s really hard on you though, so be careful if you try this. One other thing that you can try for two weeks is to watch what you say. You got to detach yourself again. You have to remove the belief that your thoughts and you are the same thing, and then you have to watch mostly what you say. You have to see—and this is something that Rogers would also be an advocate of—you have to see if what you say makes you feel— you have to see if what you say improves the quality of your being or makes it worse. You know, if you stop believing in what you say and watch what the consequences are instead, how it manifests itself in terms of a transformation of being, then you can also learn how to only say things that improve the quality of being.

Well, that's a good thing if you can manage it, but it’s terrifying in some sense because one of the things that you’ll find is that hardly anything that you say does that. Most of it is neutral, but a fair bit of it has exactly the opposite consequence—it makes things worse. So, I think I mentioned that the word phenomena—that's where the term phenomenology, the term phenomenology comes from, obviously. The term phenomena means—it’s from the Greek word, “phainesthai,” and “phainesthai” means “to shine forth.”

The phenomenologists’ argument is that being is made up of meanings that shine forth for you, and that those different meanings attract you. They're like—they're like guideposts that you can follow. So you know, one of the—I’ve noticed this, for example, in relationship to reading. I’ll be reading a complex text, and some passage will really strike me. So it manifests itself as meaningful. Why is that? Well, you know, one of the phenomenologists, which would be Binswanger, would say, well it’s because of the way that I’m structured.

But Boss would say, well no, it’s a dance that's occurring within the structure of everything. The consequence of that is the manifestation of this meaning. What I found is that I can follow threads of meaning through books, you know, that it’s like it’s something that's guiding me. That sense of meaning, often if I find something within a book that's meaningful, then I’ll read the other things that that person wrote, and I’ll see that some of the people that they read have meaningful things to say, and then I can branch out that network.

It’s following a pathway that's laid out for you, in some sense it’s laid out for you in the world. The phenomenological idea is that if you follow that pathway, then what happens is being becomes more and more integrated around you. Those experiences of intrinsic meaning start to multiply and increase in intensity. If you're able to do that over a long period of time, then you can get more and more of the totality of your being revealing the kinds of meanings that stop you from being either nihilistic or totalitarian.

Well, that's the basic—that's the fundamental theory of phenomenological psychotherapy, you know. You might first say, well you know, you're depressed and anxious and your life isn't going very well. What keeps you afloat? It’s something to observe. Then we might say, well are there ways that we can expand that small area that's keeping you afloat so that it starts to occupy more and more of your experience and push back the parts that are either neutral or negative? It’s a—it's in large part a consequence of attention and willingness to, first of all, treat things as if their meaning is real. Then second, to allow that reality to transform the way that you experience things in the future.

See you Thursday.