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Andrea Righi (Miami University)

The other side of the digital: The sacrificial economy of new media

A necessary, rich new examination of how the wired world affects our humanity Andrea Righi deconstructs contradictions inherent in our digital world, examining how ideas of knowledge, desire, writing, temporality, and the woman are being reconfigured by our sacrificial economy. The Other Side of the Digital provides a necessary, in-depth cultural analysis of how the political theology of the new media functions under neoliberalism. Our tech-fueled economy is often touted as a boon for the development of our fullest human potential. But as our interactions are increasingly turned into mountains of data sifted by algorithms, what impact does this infinite accumulation and circulation of information really have on us? What are the hidden mechanisms that drive our continuous engagement with the digital? In The Other Side of the Digital, Andrea Righi argues that the Other of the digital acts as a new secular God, exerting its power through endless accountability that forces us to sacrifice ourselves for the digital. Righi deconstructs the contradictions inherent in our digital world, examining how ideas of knowledge, desire, writing, temporality, and the woman are being reconfigured by our sacrificial economy. His analyses include how both our self-image and our perception of reality are skewed by technologies like fitness bands, matchmaking apps, and search engines, among others. The Other Side of the Digital provides a necessary, in-depth cultural analysis of how the political theology of the new media functions under neoliberalism. Drawing on the work of well-known thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as Carla Lonzi, Luisa Muraro, and Luciano Parinetto, Righi creates novel appraisals of popular digital tools that we now use routinely to process life experiences. Asking why we must sign up for this sort of regime, The Other Side of the Digital is an important wake-up call to a world deeply entangled with the digital. Andrea Righi is associate professor of Italian studies at Miami University. He is author of

Italian Reactionary Thought and Critical Theory: An Inquiry into Savage Modernities and Biopolitics

and

Social Change in Italy: From Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri.

He coedited, with Cesare Casarino, Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism (Minnesota, 2018).

Table of contents

Introduction: The Sexed Truth of Neoliberal Digitality

1. Transcendence: Moses, or The Other of the Other

2. Knowledge: Online Fee-Ding as the Solution to Meno's Paradox

3. Desire: The Ballistic Sexuality of Drones and Tinder

4. Writing: The Quantified Self and Digital Accountability

5. Temporality: Turks, Mammets, and Digital Crowdworking Platforms

6. Woman: Love and Automated Profi

7. Hysteria: The Moses of Bernardo Bertolucci

8. Passivity: The Other as Other

Interview by August Baker

transcript

Host: Welcome to Author Podcasts. Today, we're talking to Andrea Righi. Andrea Righi is the author of Italian Reactionary Thought and Critical Theory and Inquiry Into Savage Modernities and Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy from Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri. He's on the faculty of Miami University in Ohio. Today, we're talking to Professor Righi about his book, "The Other Side of the Digital: The Sacrificial Economy of New Media." That's from the University of Minnesota Press 2021. Tatiana Terranova writes this book. Andrea Righi provides a challenging and original account of what he calls neoliberal digitality, bringing a unique psychoanalytic feminist approach to bear on the contemporary condition of compulsive, anxious, and incessant engagement with computational platforms. Welcome, Andrea. Andrea Righi: Thank you and hello to everybody. A pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Host: I like the way you started your book with something that a student described to you. Like, the idea of students teaching the teachers, could you explain what that student described to you? Andrea: Yeah. It was right after the election when Trump won the presidential election in 2016 and there was a lot of anxiety among some students, not all but some students. One of them is a particularly brilliant one who was actually working with me. Then, he helps me with the research. He told me about this infinite loop he got into the night of the election when he was trying to find some information that would perhaps stop the inevitable. The interesting thing was that whenever he would find something that would support the possibility that perhaps, votes were not counted or something, of course, the next move was going to be to the next page or the next website that would somehow undercut it or expand it. And so, the true meaning for something that was already impossible logically was precisely the movement, not the content that he was seeking, but the very motion that he had to go through in a way, becoming a sort of a digital machine himself that exists to continue, exist to produce movement independently, perhaps from specific aims. So I was very touched by his account, particularly because I think I went through some part of it as well with the [crosstalk] way and other events and other things but it really sounded very familiar, very fundamental, and crucial in a way for the world we live in. Host: Yes. It resonated for me, too. Well, in a lot of ways but one is just this continual, you talk about what's the right word for this. Is it looking, searching, finding but this continual, the next click is going to get me what I'm looking for but I'm not really sure what I'm looking for? I know from experience, it's not going to end but I'm in it, anyway. Andrea: Right. It is the template for what we do for the workers of knowledge. It's positive in that way. When it doesn't become obsessive. There is a push to expand, rebuild, reassess, and re-evaluate. But this template now has been used as the perfect economic engine to produce value, perhaps not exactly money or immediate capital but a value that then translates into some form of profit. The book doesn't really investigate the surveillance part of it. I'm more interested in self-engagement. He doesn't even need anymore the big eye of the algorithm somehow because much of the job we're doing is exactly that. We do it one entirely. We have interiorized some logic that keeps us cooked up to the digital realities that we use. Host: Right. And so, they interiorized. You have the term neoliberal digitality to the neoliberal, part of that is going to be that interiorization? Andrea: Yes. So that's a little bit of a concept that I felt the need to put together, neoliberal digitality, particularly because I didn't want to collapse the fact that what happens online, what happens in the digital world is all bad. There's a capitalistic use which is predominant in the digitality of the digital world that goes in that direction. But there are examples which I won't go into detail, I can study much, but the rows of the potentialities, the possibilities for completely different uses would be in fact, much more beneficial for us and for the technology itself. I think the goal will be to liberate technology from this. In a book, I call "Talk About the Sort of Self-Paralyzation," which is a mechanism that wants to produce only value for value's sake, not for any specific reason. Freeing technology from that agenda would unleash us into a different world, I think. A much better world. So yeah. So neoliberal is a specific determination of what happens online following some of these rules that I already talked about. Host: So on the one hand, you talked about the pragmatic image of the self. You talked about, this would be, I guess, it can be a positive and out of the laser-sharp sense of interiority. The subject is fully committed to action, well-organized in all his multitasking activity, and driven toward growth. On the other hand, you talk about, with our ever-growing array of technical devices, we are somehow systemically undermined or subjected to a form of symbolic dependence. Andrea: So for instance, in the book, I talk about technology like the Fitbit or tracking devices which I think do serve a purpose for health reasons. Their medical applications are very important. Even the basic Fitbit, if used correctly, probably can help us live a better life and less sedentary life. But it also has the side effect of producing an idea of the self that follows specific rules, which are completely geared toward development and they're under indictment of the own logic of the technology itself. So you're not using the Fitbit to be in better shape, to get some fresh air. You're using Fitbit to score the points that the software wants you to score. Host: Yeah. Andrea: Again, the same student was an incredible source of this. I did thank him in the [inaudible]. Every conversation I had with them was very illuminating. So he worked at a Home Depot for the summer. He had a Fitbit. He realized that doing longer routes to get the stuff that he needed to move things around just to make the space. Host: Right. Andrea: Which again, it shows you how technology, the instrumentality of technology can be turned in a different direction. In this way, I was very happy. It was a form of indirect strike or slowdown of work because he was not complying with the very strict rhythm that the business was imposing on him. Host: Very good point. Yeah. Andrea: But he was actually slowing down that by simply following that Fitbit. But on the opposite side, commonly, people who just go out to do the steps, not to do anything else. At that point, what is the logic behind it, right? You become then, the self becomes that graphic on your phone or whatever you use with those statistics of yourself, as a sort of cartoonish representation of graphs and arrows, which are very dangerous. We grow up thinking about these graphs that have a scientific foundation but they are representations, a very gross representation of very partial inputs. Host: Yeah. Andrea: But they have the arrows of science, you know? Host: All right. Andrea: That's what you do today. You put up a PowerPoint with the graphs. And everybody is going to go and say, "Oh, yes, we are in trouble because the arrow goes in the wrong direction." Host: Right. Andrea: But these are representations. That's where the humanist should step in and say, "This is a very partial representation of reality that is much messier than what you're talking about." Host: Right. Andrea: When you do that, think about yourself and you become that engine for growth. Again, you are fully new liberalized. You're already in that cog into the new machine that makes you think you are freer in your growth, in your capital or responsibility, in your portfolio, all these words that they have. But at the end of the day, it's actually enslaving you into a logic that is completely alien. Host: Right. Yeah. I thought it was interesting that you used the basic concept of human capital. How has that idea insinuated itself into our minds and our view of ourselves? Andrea: Yeah. That was one of the things that I started to analyze in the first book, in Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy. It's who caused the idea that the big break in modernity is the moment in which from the definition of the working class, with all that comes with that, we moved to the idea that workers are now human capital. They are firm in themselves. If you are a firm, again, you need to grow. Whatever you do, you have to have a returning investment. Of course, you're freer. It seems like at least you're freer, you're more independent, and obviously, you're more engaged in what you do because you gain something out of it. You gain more out of it. But again, it interiorizes a form that is deeply troubling for me because it affects also human relationships. Host: Sure. Well, yeah. Also just introducing yourself to someone, they want to know about your human capital and you're kind of trapped in your human capital once you have it, right? It would be odd to not be using it to go off in a different direction for example. Andrea: Yeah. Or if you're very brave, then you can try to do that but you're at risk and in peril and then, you know, that's another very neoliberal thing that all the ills of society are basically failed attempts by individuals, everybody's responsible for the failure of one's own failure. So again, a lack of solidarity that was already ingrained in the structure of society under Fordism. I am from a generation that saw the shift. My parents, my father was a factory worker. So this thing would tell me the discourses that atmosphere there will hear regarding the factory, the workers, the union, the society around it, the free time around it, the free time which was the free time when he was not working time. That, I saw it. I remember it. But then, as I grew up already in this new narrative of the human capital, I tested how he disappeared and liquidated into this new thing that we have to be. The disappearance of free time, of non-working time. Now, labor in space. And it's incredible, we don't think about it enough. It's a major transformation of our societies. West society. Host: One of the things you mentioned was the neoliberal fatwa against inactivity must always be efficiently producing or there's a guilt that goes along with that. Andrea: Yeah. Neoliberalism is fundamentalist. It's a fundamentalist cult in a way and so it has its dogma just like back in the Middle Ages. It will burn people if they go against it. So one thing that I, for instance, I was talking about teaching. One thing that I try to teach my students when I do summer programs is the understanding that part of this immersion in a different culture is the idea that you need to learn how to not do anything. In Italy, it has been pulling, modernizing, globalize but it is still a cultural idea of that there is good to be unproductive. The Latin word is otiosum[?]. To not do anything without feeling anxious. That's the most difficult thing. Without feeling anxious about the lack of activities. I remember coming to the United States in the 90s and I remember teenagers talking about being bored. Being bored, which maybe is right. It was true but we lost the capacity of being bored without feeling anxious. Those are essential moments because there are also moments where you have real human contact with people. The fact that you're just simply conversing and or just sitting next to each other or contemplating things. Silence, right? These things are forbidden. These things are scandalous for neoliberalism and they make it clear. Again, my students are very prime examples of this kind of attitude. Host: Right. Somehow, when I was reading this, I kept thinking about the cons. I think the idea of successful psychoanalytic treatment would end up with someone who was able to enjoy their enjoyment. Andrea: Yeah. Host: Which seems to be similar. Andrea: Paradoxical[?]. Host: The people who are not able to enjoy their enjoyment now or their passion. Andrea: I'm part of it too. So there is a desperate need for enjoying and also this injunction to enjoy. That's the cause as you know, [inaudible] explain, we grow up with this injunction, we should enjoy. Once you have that injunction, it takes away a lot of the fluidity that perhaps a human body, human mind could have while enjoying because you are already performing under certain standards, which are never, they had a promise, these stances are never clear. So what does it mean? The sort of benchmarking mechanism where you're constantly comparing yourself with, okay, am I enjoying enough. Is it better than this? Should I do more? It does kick in and then we become desperate. Host: I thought it's interesting that you talk about a sacrificial economy, in which we make ritualistic offerings. And then you pose the question. That's kind of the question of the book is beholden to the symbolic authority, who is the title holder of that symbolic force? Andrea: Yeah, the problem is human culture is based on some form of other entity. There's always another. It doesn't have to be bad or something. There's always another races. And it's an imaginary entity that we construct. The problem is neoliberal digitality has kidnapped that other and now is pushing this other tool to make us do certain things. Look, before in pre-modern times, in a society like European societies under the grip of the church, this other was another punishment, possible redemption, it was another with the other of rules. Of rules, merits, and then, punishment, right? It established a criteria for how you have to behave. And so, in a way, it did provide some form of security, if you believe on that. The other of the digital is another one's continuous engagement and continuous growth. And without setting a criteria. Again, so it pushes us to an amount of work that usually is detrimental. It also creates an enormous amount of anxiety. The other is always a source of anxiety, but this other who doesn't even, this is the famous Walter Benjamin idea that capitalism is a cult without salvation. Without redemption. It's a cult that does not allow for expiation. So the anxiety keeps piling up. I think, I don't have the data to prove that. But I think the amount of illness psychological in this that I can see among students as well, the percentage of students who are already medicated when they come in is constantly going. It's not just a cultural factor. It's not just related to the pandemic. It is connected to the widespread anxiety that the new other now is enforcing on us. We should instead think about a different version of the other. The other is the other people. The other in society is the other that you encounter who's not somebody you can control, who's not somebody you can possess, it's the other you encounter. It does produce anxiety but there's also the possibility of a relationship of respect. It would become much more humane than this digital other that we encountered online, which is the other that keeps telling you to click the next link. There's going to be information, a better information at the next level. So just keep doing what you're doing. Host: Right. One of the things that you said is that neoliberal digitality not only nullifies idealization but also perverts sublimation. Could you touch on that? Because of course, I always think about sublimation as saving something we can look to or something that is good and healthy. Andrea: Yeah, sure. Sublimation psychoanalysis is a basic function that helps society together by diverting. By sublimation then, it means that it's objectless. That you don't really find, you don't need that thing. You're simply diverting your way and that is a work form in mechanism that helps the group to be together. What does neoliberalism? It simply takes that objectless movement and promises you as I was saying before that, well, yes, it's not this new thing you're going to buy on Amazon that probably will satisfy you. It's not the next one, but the series will. The series, the infinite series of our interaction online is... Host: Missing. Andrea: Make you feel enjoyable and produces sort of [inaudible] of desire too. So, in the book, I talk about a drive that becomes a death drive because it's a repetition that eventually depleted the subject. It's very interesting. Like, Freud elaborated that the cause of the death drive after World War 1, when he was visiting soldiers coming back, traumatized soldiers coming back from the war that they were very sick. Psychologically sick. Didn't have any wounds, they didn't have any organic wounds but they would be involved in these repetitive acts like the goose march which could unpack only by thinking about the big trauma that they suffered and how they could not respond to the time. Because of course, they were overwhelmed with the shock, by the tragedy. And so the intent was to become active again later. They couldn't change the past, but they could impact the present by simply repeating an action that was somehow connected to that tragedy. But that action, of course, was threatening the body itself because it could not change the past and you had to be repeated endlessly. We are finite beings and that endless repetition, physical repetition, I think, produces eventually death in a way. Host: I thought the one really fascinating part of your book was the discussion of the-, you said, there could not be a more playbook illustration of the hegemony of the death drive than the Second Amendment. The fury around 2nd Amendment. Could you touch on that, please? Andrea: Yeah, that is quite striking and the discourse of the media is, I think it's misguided. It's completely misguided. I mean, Napoleon once said, you cannot sit on [inaudible]. Okay, so I've got an arm, it has a goal. And that's what it is to Earth. It's to kill, right? If you engage with it, you'll be subject to that logic. And it seems like because of the wide availability of weapons in this country, a lot of people are simply following into this death drive. That is to say, into the machine ecologic of the weapon itself. You can go back probably and look at psychological origins for what has been done, right? Today. And can you explain the acts? Perhaps you can have a diagnosis but I don't think you will have as in a mystery novel, you will have a cooper. You don't have a cause for what these people are doing because what they're doing is following the instrument, the apparatus. They're enacting the apparatus and that's right. There is no, if you had to write a novel about it, you will be a serialized novel where one thing leads to another without any reason behind it. Like the Last Vegas shooter. For me, it was the ultimate example of all the fake explanations that the right wings and second amendment people have regarding it. Oh, but you know, you need one good guy with a gun. That was the perfect example. A sniper shooting from above at night. And the chaos, there's no way you can defend yourself even if everybody was on there, right? And what was the reason behind it? We would never know what the reason is. The reason is you have these machine guns, you have your eye positioned, and you enact the logic of the apparatus. That's a test drive, I think. Host: Yeah. I also thought about mass incarceration as a similar example. You had a discussion on page 55. The great man, the new hero must embody the bottom-most dimension of life. Evil could be the added value to make someone he is. Somebody who takes destiny in his hands no matter the consequences of his conduct is, his willingness to go above and beyond accepted norms. Andrea: Again, it's not a disturbing principle of our society. If you think about it, doing the right thing, it's not as heroic as doing something wrong knowing that it's wrong for the higher purpose. Here, you connect also the dimension of American imperialism abroad. We know we're doing something, but we're doing it for the higher purpose. It takes really some hero to do that, right? So think about the others anymore. You simply put yourself in the position of a big other, who needs to be greater than life and do a horrible action. The divide is throwing societies and it is connected with the US[?] so that the military-industrial complex, the use of weapons, and more of that are behind our society. The individualism that is behind our society, right? It's a wicked, truly a wicked paradox that I think is predominant. Host: Tell us about the digital accountability and the quantified self or a little bit about your discussion here. Andrea: Yeah. So once you transform that moral apparatus of pre-modern society where as I was saying before, you have a model for redemption. You have punishment but you also have the possibility of salvation. You enter into a sacrificial logic because what you do is in a way responding to a dictum so you behave in hope that the judgment would be positive. Nobody would assure you that you'll be safe but at least you are trying to do that. Now again, that is not I would say, the authentic also Creed of Christianity. The great theologians, for instance, Saint Catherine of Siena, she clearly laid out the idea that you should do good things not because in hope of a recompense. You should do good because God is our neighbor. So you have to help the other, right? At a certain point, I don't know how-, The dialogue is called that, it's incredible philosophical reflection on God. I don't know how that book didn't get blacklisted or anything, but at a certain point, she even says, "God doesn't care about what we do." Okay, what we have to do is for the other. Not because God is watching us, right? So in any case, you have a system, a pre-modern system, where you have a more of bookkeeping in a way and you can follow it. The more of tip was limited and quantifiable. You move to a new conception of the other that does not, that tells you that their salvation is in your perpetual growth. Then the sacrificial logic becomes infinite and you are accountable to the end of the days. And so the only response I argue that you can have towards an entity, it says that you are accountable for everything you do. For every second in your life that you're not productive, you are accountable. One of the only solution I imagine is like your pay is more than [inaudible]. Okay, you just do a little thing. Okay, well I did this, and then, ten minutes I'll do something else and you keep doing it. That's the refreshing mechanism that pushes us to refresh the page all the time. Push something. Just do something. At least, do something. Otherwise, you're not doing anything, then, you're completely accountable. At least, you can pay back little by little. It's like paying back your credit card. You don't pay the full card. [inaudible] debt, right? Host: Right. Andrea: But you pay part of it. Now, that is a logic that does not apply to everybody. I think there is an elite in the country who's always saying, they are never responsible and they're always in the grace. And that's what was the, you know, or signees. I could go on who would that be. Host: Yeah. I think you talked about sort of directions to go in chapter 8 and we talked about passivity as not being inert. You say passivity implies a surplus that keeps sociality regenerating itself. Breaking ground for a non-masculine topology that produces a new symbolic economy. This was nice to have at the end of the book. Just tell readers what they might expect to see there. Andrea: Yeah. So we talked a little bit about this symbolic dependency that is negative because it's full accountability. It never ends. I'm not saying that you shouldn't miss that. Know the debt that you have from other people. That is the positive. That's the good debt. The good passivity. What does it mean? We go back to the template for the subject that I explained earlier. If you are a human capital, you're looking for a return of investment. Everything, every time you do something and also in return you meet somebody or you deal with somebody else, right? So you intrumentalized every relationship which has big impact on sexuality as well. Now, this other instead idea of dependency is the frame of mind in which you think about the debt that you have to other people. Favors you can ask but not in order to gain something, but simply in order to enjoy the presence of the other. This is a point that the great David Graeber, late great David Graeber, great anthropologist, made in a couple of books like that the first 5,000 years. Much of our interactions are pointless. Do not point to any specific thing that we need to do. But it's just a pleasure that human, you know, that the animal pleasure of being in together. Human pleasure. So we as good neighbors, sometimes, we invent pretests to just deal with each other. So I can come and ask you for, I don't know, the lawn mower. "Hey, can I use it?" And then, I feel that I should somehow reciprocate and I can come back and say thank you for that. I'll bring a bottle of wine. At that point, you are caught up in the same. But again, this does not have, the goal is only pleasure. The pleasure of conversing being together, the presence of each other. And the fact that we are indebted to each other, we're constantly in debt to each other. But you know, that goes back to our ontology. We are an animal that was able to survive only as a group. That's the [inaudible]. That's the other. It's the sociality that has always been there since we became human. Which probably is there too. In the animal kingdom as well, maybe it takes different shapes but that's the enjoyment. The enjoyment is in the presence of others and in expanding this presence, in prolonging it, and reaching it, that's what digitally should do, should help us do. But the majority of [inaudible] is not. Host: Right. And I guess the trick there is that people tend to form groups, affiliative groups, and then there are in-groups and out-groups, and digitally should be able to help there since in theory, it could be anyone is able to connect with people, regardless of one's ability to widen one's group indefinitely. Andrea: Yeah, although the [inaudible] instead, they're trying to do the opposite. They work with cluster systems and so the groups of affinities because those groups will keep you online for longer, so that's not a problem. There's also a sacrificial mechanism in place in groups where when there's a problem, then you'll find the culprit. And then you have to sacrifice that to accomplish. So anyone needs to have other mechanisms that will disable that marking, that exclusionary logic that reduces the other. It's not easy. At the end, the last chapters were a way to point towards theoretically to something different by introducing authors that are not translated in English as well. Host: I understand. We're almost out of time but I wanted to ask you about something. This isn't really in the book. I just wanted to add that I saw but I just wanted to hear your thoughts on it. You talk about human corporality as a form of coding that produces gestures and rituals but also material incisions on the flesh and subsequently, volitions. This kind of bodily writing captures and creates emotional intensities. Later, language written in blood is a memory of the spoken word. I just kept thinking about adolescents today who cut themselves as a form. Which I haven't really been able to understand and I just, also, tattooing and piercing and everything but especially that kind of cutting oneself as a kind of bodily writing. I don't know if you've ever connected those two. Andrea: Yeah that was a part passage from Watari and Delirious[?]. I think the harmful practices, when they are harmful, there are instances where these practice has become a form of expression, of artistic expression, which when they are harmful in style, I think they denote a lack of possibility of language. So it's like that need to express something gets blocked into something that produces only the spilling of blood which in itself, it is a form of expression but it doesn't reach that symbolic level of articulation. Look, literature is full of cases of wounds that speak. There are, for instance, in the Divine Comedy. As in self, talk to a tree that he breaks a branch, and then it bleeds out. And then the words pour out. You need that expression after the cutting. You need that. Otherwise, it simply becomes a self-inflicted process that does not heal, right? We talked about psychoanalysis. [crosstalk] Language is a cure. It doesn't resolve the cause, but it is in the articulation of that language that you find perhaps the possibility of enjoying. Host: The book is "The Other Side of the Digital: The Sacrificial Economy of New Media" by Andrea Righi. Thank you so much, Professor Righi, for joining me today. I appreciate your time. Andrea: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. [END]

Richard Frankel

Victor J. Krebs

Human virtuality and digital life: Philosophical and psychoanalytic investigations

This book is a psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of how the digital is transforming our perception of the world and our understanding of ourselves. Drawing on examples from everyday life, myth, and popular culture, this book argues that virtual reality is only the latest instantiation of the phenomenon of the virtual, which is intrinsic to human being. It illuminates what is at stake in our understanding of the relationship between the virtual and the real, showing how our present technologies both enhance and diminish our psychological lives.

Frankel and Krebs claim that technology is a pharmakon - at the same time both a remedy and a poison - and in their writing exemplify a method that overcomes the polarization that compels us to regard it either as a liberating force or a dangerous threat in human life.

The digital revolution challenges us to reckon with the implications of what is being called our posthuman condition, leaving behind our modern conception of the world as constituted by atemporal essences and reconceiving it instead as one of processes and change.

The book's postscript considers the sudden plunge into the virtual effected by the 2020 global pandemic.

Accessible and wide-reaching, this book will appeal not only to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, but anyone interested in the ways virtuality and the digital are transforming our contemporary lives.

Author(s) Biography

Richard Frankel, is a faculty member and supervisor at The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is a teaching associate and supervisor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and has a private practice in Cambridge, MA. He is the author of The Adolescent Psyche: Jungian and Winnicottian Perspectives.

Victor J. Krebs is professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and philosophical curator at VJK Curaduria Filosófica. He is author of La imaginación pornográfica: contra el escepticismo en la cultura, and editor (with William Day) of Seeing Wittgenstein anew.

Reviews 'Whether we embrace it or resist it, digital communication is one of the defining facts of our times. In their rivetingly thorough and engaging account, Frankel and Krebs show us what psychoanalysis has to do with and do for our digital age. And like all the more interesting psychoanalytical books, it is about far more than psychoanalysis.' --Adam Phillips, general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics, translations of Sigmund Freud; author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; Going Sane; Side Effects; Missing Out; One Way and Another; and most recently, The Cure for Psychoanalysis

'Secluded during the COVID pandemic, I sank into this extraordinary and utterly timely work. Human Virtuality and Digital Life pursues the deeper ambiguities and opportunities of our suddenly, radically digitalized existences. Ranging effortlessly from bison painted on caves to the semiotics of photography to our new "0-1" worlds, from Plato and Walter Benjamin to D.W Winnicott and Guy Debord, the authors consider the way seeing, thinking, and being will change, the way truth, time, and space will bend, the way our most private possession, our own psyches, will be both impoverished and enriched by what is no longer a dream but is our waking present. A brilliant work.' --George Makari, director, DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine; author of Soul Machine: The Making of the Modern Mind and Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis

'This ground-breaking book is a must-read for anybody interested in how the meaning of the human is being reshaped by digital communication. Who are we becoming as we relate to others and to ourselves via social media, and virtual worlds? How are technological enhancements of human life transforming who we are? This book offers exciting new perspectives on these timely questions that broaden tremendously our way of understanding the media-enhanced world that we have created and is (re-)creating us. Viewing technology as a pharmakon that can be both a remedy and a poison, the different chapters offer powerful elucidations of the ways in which the digitalization of our lives has transformed our world and our capacity to experience and imagine. Using insights from both philosophy and psychoanalysis, the book brilliantly explores digital and virtual technology as "a laboratory of subjectivity" that opens up new possibilities for human existence and new configurations of selfhood and otherness. This mesmerizing book is at the forefront of contemporary philosophical discussions of the human and the post-human, and raises provocative questions about technology and the future of humanity that will spark new debates. A masterpiece.' --Josž Medina, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University; author of Speaking from Elsewhere and The Epistemology of Resistance

'A brilliant articulation of a philosophy of human virtuality for the digital era, conceived in terms of our psychic drives to massify, fracture, and capture our desires, our self-image, and the densities of our lives. The ambivalence and numinosity of digital life in the era of COVID has not found more significant expression. The flow and stoppage of time, truth and post-truth, reality and hyper-reality, beliefs, concepts, images, politics, film, our ancestral bodily capacities: they are all treated here. A sweeping and insightful grasp of technology to bear on our time. A tour de force.' ---Juliet Floyd, Professor of Philosophy at Boston University; author (with Felix Mÿhlholzer) of Wittgenstein's Annotations to Hardy's Course of Pure Mathematics

Transcript

August: Welcome. Today we are talking about the book, Human Virtuality and Digital Life, Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations by Richard Frankel and Victor j Krebs. That's, Rutledge. Richard Frankel is faculty member and supervisor at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis teaching associate and supervisor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and has a private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's the author of the Adolescent Psyche Union and Winnicottian perspective. Victor j Krebs is Professor of Philosophy at Pontifical Catholic, university of Peru, and philosophical curator at VJK. He's the author of La imaginacion Pornografica and the editor with William Day of Seeing Wittgstein Anew. Welcome gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'd like to read a couple of the reviews here. you have a review from Adam Phillips, which I was saying was very impressive. He says, in their rivetingly thorough and engaging account, Frankel and Krebs show us what psychoanalysis has to do with and do four our digital age. George McCray says in the book, human Virtuality and Digital Life pursues the deeper ambiguities and opportunities of our suddenly radically digitalized experiences. The authors consider the way our most private possession, our own psyches will be both impoverished and enriched by what is no longer a dream, but is our waking present of brilliant work. That's, George McCurry of Cornell Medical School, and I'll read one more. Jose Medina professor philosophy at Northwestern using insights from both philosophy and psychoanalysis. The book brilliantly explores digital and virtual technology as new as a laboratory of subjectivity that opens up new possibilities for human experience and new configurations of selfhood and otherness. This mesmerizing book is at the forefront of contemporary philosophical discussions of the human and the posthuman, and raises provocative questions about technology and the future of humanity that will spark new debates a masterpiece. I wanted to actually start by you have a quote at the very beginning. I wondered if you could just talk about why you chose it, but it seemed important throughout the whole book. it's from Bernard Stiegler. You have this quote highlighting the toxicity of the digital, maybe salutary, but forgetting how it can be beneficial and how it is pharmacological is dangerous. What about that quote did you think was a good starting point, either of you? Victor: I'm allowing Richard to start with that, comment. August: Okay. Richard: It's interesting because we really discovered, Bernard Stiegler about, seven eighths the way through the book. But subsequent to writing the book, he has been very, very impactful for us. And, part of the way that we were situating the book and what we noticed as we were writing the book is that as we got into different kinds of discussions with people about the digital age and the effects of technology, it was always inevitable that the discussions were going to polarize into technology is great benefit to humanity or technology is destroying humanity. And it was very difficult to find ways of talking about it that held the tension of those two perspectives. And I think Stiegler really approaches the issue from what he calls a pharmacological perspective, of course, going back to dairy dos concept of Plato's pharmakon as a kind of healing poison or technology as a remedy and a poison at the same time. And we wanted to sort of delve into that and see if we could write out of that perspective and in a way that really tries to keep that tension alive in the writing. Victor: That tension, which, George McCray also mentions in describing our book about our being able or our being interested in showing how both our psyche is empowered and impoverished by digitality shows also that the need to be not just aware of how it's harming us, which is practically what, I would say a Stiegler does in probably masterful way more than most people. And that it's important that he emphasizes the importance of showing also where it is bringing something positive to us where the potential for benefit comes in technology. And I think that that's something that we have tried to balance out throughout the book to show not only how it is harming us, but how technology really is a, the potential of the future if we know how to manage it as we would. The pharmacological comes from the Greek pharmakon, which the Greeks called whatever phenomena was both a remedy and a poison. And so that polarity, I think is something that we keep, try to keep together rather than allow them to be, separated as they are usually in normal discourses about technology. August: Yeah. So I wasn't aware of that. It's interesting because of course the reader typically thinks, when you mentioned pharmacological or pharmakon, we, I think about drugs and actually I wanted to, there was a quotation that kept coming to me. This is kind of a free association, but I wondered if you think it's related. This is from Jonathan Lee Love, its place in Nature. He's writing in 1990. And he says, he, he's concerned about the decline in interest in psychoanalysis and terms of, he says, that there will be marvelous advances in neurology and pharmacology is beyond question that they will solve the conflicts inherent in living this particular life is fantasy and however valuable it may be to jumpstart someone out of a depression. And a just viable from the point of view of our commitment to the individual. The all important question is what happens next? Does the person use the relief from crippling pain as an opportunity to work through the meanings and conflicts inherent in his life? Or is he relieved of that opportunity? Did you think there were some relationships between this, the pharmacological, the drugs question and the, this virtual reality issue? Victor: That's an interesting question. It's an interesting way of looking at what we're we're doing. Because you're using layers distinction between the, the pharmacological as what the medicine does to your body. And what then you have to work through when you're psyche. And I think that one of the wonderful things about whether we've discovered in our explorations is that, if we're going to really appreciate the nature of technology, we have to see it as an extension of ourselves, not as something external to us. And we talk about the pharmacological nature of the tech of technology. We're talking about both. It's in a way extending not only our body, but also our psyche. And so sharing with our psyche also and with our body, the opacities, the unconsciousness that comes with it. So when we talk about the pharmacological, we want rather to integrate these two aspects rather than separate them so that the pharmacological layer sense would help us to get to another dimension of the same phenomenon rather than to allow us to do something different. And I think this is something I, we've struggled with trying to make sure that the technological doesn't look like an external thing to us, like an object of tool use, whatever. But in our using it, we're already expressing ourselves and discovering something in technology about our own limitations and potentialities and so on. August: And I take it that this idea of both a, I guess etymologically, this idea, both a poison and a remedy predates our current understanding of a drug as at least supposedly only trying to do the positive. Richard: Yes. August: Okay. Richard: I mean, but just a quick aside, we would say, of course, anyone who's taking psychiatric drugs experiences them as pharmakon because they both relieve you of something. And there's also often very bad side effects. There's often ways people report about certain kind of effective states that are no longer open to them. August: Right. Definitely. Richard: So the decision to take those medicines always has a pharmacological sort of tension in them. Victor: And there's always the side effects that we find in the description of the drug. There's always side effects. It's not that we're not aware of it, but perhaps our culture, because it is, has been so focused on how we can improve things have de-emphasized something that was already from the beginning in the meaning of the term. The pharmakon always is is something that depends on a certain dosage for it to be beneficial rather than harmful. August: There's also this sense of one of the side effects being flattening. And you talk a lot in here about flattening in terms of virtual. Can you comment on that. Richard: Yeah. In terms of, in terms of virtual, you're saying? August: Yes. Richard: Yeah. I mean, just to stick with Victor's notion of dosage, that there is something about our own use of the digital, right. That in the beginning you go on, you're searching something, you're looking for something and it's very a livening and your associations are moving and you feel a certain kind of animated, animatedness and aliveness. August: Sure. Richard: But too much time spent on the digital often then results in the opposite of that, which is a kind of flattening and a two dimensionality. And there we all talk today about kind of zoom burnout. We're doing therapy on Zoom, and of course in the pandemic, it's offered this opportunity to keep therapies going that could not have kept going, and there's been something incredibly valuable August: About Yeah. Richard: But you also can know that you spend all day on Zoom and you as a person feel the flatness of it, and you feel what's not what you can't be reached through zoom. And so that tension, that tension of enlivening and flattening, I think is always embedded in the digital Victor: . And it's, and it's been really part of our, our discussion from the very beginning. I mean, Richard and I have met long, a long time ago, long before the digital started, really. And so we've lived together through these things. And I remember one of the examples, let's say, of this first initial sort of just brightening and potentiating of something, and suddenly it's becoming flatten again, was our discovery of, of possibility, of having all the music you could have in your gadget. It was like, we couldn't believe it. We were so excited and suddenly we realized that actually nowadays, see, people will not even blink at that fact. In fact, having so much music, in fact has had the opposite effect. They're not as excited about music as you can have it there. So there's something about the pharmakon that this person, there, there's something paradoxical that's happening. You're being attracted by something. It's really filling you up and it fills you up so much that suddenly it numbs you. August: Yes. Right. And I, I certainly, I mean, your book is very timely because it seems, would you say that the pandemic what was already there, it had just gone further? I mean, as you were kind of anticipating that. Victor: We were forced to write a post script because everything we had talked about suddenly became so obvious . August: Well, not obvious, but more important in our Yeah. In our lives. Yes. And you talk about flattening, I don't know if it's just me, but I find that if I'm on a zoom call, it's very easy to do mute people and just not listen to them at all. Richard: Right? Yes. August: And just, and other tell other people do that to me too, because they don't actually hear what I would say. Richard: Right, Victor: But that activates something else that we also point out about technology, and that is that it becomes also, it can also become a weapon of power asserting power on the other. And so many ways in which we can do that, both consciously and unconsciously, August: To the point where you can just not listen to someone. Right. Right. You don't have standing, I'm just going to push this button and you have no standing. So in the introduction, you talk about the parallel between turning towards our devices and on the other hand, shifting our attention inwards. Can you speak to that? Richard: Yeah. It's interesting what you just said, August, in terms of that you can press a button and mute something. And that's something that the, the digital allows us to do. But when we say pre digitally, we had all sorts of ways of muting people that weren't quite so obvious, which had to do with not listening, going into our own thoughts, turning our attention away from a person. So I think that that's one of the, that's one of the points we were just trying to explore a little bit. What's the digital, what are these devices allowing us to do that's sort of psychologically we weren't already doing before, with the way that attention can shift and move around in all sorts of complex ways between two people. Is this a new form? Is this something different, or is this more of the same? Or sometimes we talk about it as an intensified form, and we talk about sort of hyperreality. And August: It seems to me that, correct me if I'm wrong, you do seem to want to say that there's a, a different space now that, and that kind of, there are different types of virtuality. There's our own inner virtuality, and then there's a kind of a new space that has become evident and that they kind of merge. That was my sense. Victor: Yeah. Perhaps there we could go back to something that also I think is one of the main concepts of the book. And it has to do with the fact that, I lost my, my thought there. Can you just repeat the last thing you said? August: I was just thinking about the way we can turn our attention inwards and we can turn our Yeah. Victor: Yes. So the notion of virtuality, we tend to think that virtuality arises comes to be with a digital virtual. We think that the virtual world is the first time the virtual. But really, if we think about it, and then we've got, we go through the history of technology. We realize that the virtual is really the space of the mind that allows us to abstract our thought from our experience in present concrete reality. And so that from the very beginning, from the moment that we're human beings, thinking human beings, we have the virtual with us. It's part of our reality. And that's always infusing our reality with potencies that are actualized or not actualized possibilities that we imagine that we, that know we surround our world with. Okay. We've done that with every technology. We go through a whole bunch of examples of how writing does that it gives us a new space, then photography does that, film does that, and eventually the virtual world. But the virtual world, what it does with that virtuality is that it gives it a concreteness that it didn't have before. I mean, it was always in our mind. Now it's on a screen now that technological achievement creates a dimension of our experience that is outside of us, not no longer outside us, but that has that quality. And not only that, but now can be shared with others. So it's, it's like we have a, a universal mind in which we all can go in. That's a new experience. I think that that really does create a a kink as, as it were in the history of the virtual. Suddenly the virtual has acquired a dimension that is on a par where spatial temporal reality, how does that affect us? How is that affecting our notion of what it is to be human, our notion of the world, how it's to relate to one another, Richard: How we live in time, how we relate to the fact of our own mortality, how we relate to fantasy and imagination. I mean you want to be a little bit, when we would say it's really has created this new kind of potential space, and it's a potential space that is surprisingly chaotic and creative, and one that we don't quite know what to do with, yet. It's impacting us in all sorts of conscious, unconscious ways. I think that's really what we're trying to explore in the book. August: And the screen, of course is literally flat literally flattened now. Yeah. I was often wondering reading this, I was kind of skeptically or trying to challenge it thinking, well, okay, we stared our screens, but it used to be that people would carry around a book, maybe the Bible, and they would stare at it a lot. But I guess the point is, well, you tell me, but I understand the point is that it wasn't really shared with other people at that. I mean, it was shared with other people. They had their own bibles, but it wasn't this place where other people were also looking at what you were looking at at that time. Victor: Exactly. That's, and that's essential because if you think about it, there are other people there in, as it were, your digital mind, those other people have an influx in your own existence. I mean, you might be working something and suddenly something pops up on your screen Or you're looking for something in the internet, and suddenly you realize there's, there's a connection here that you hadn't seen, but that's being inputted to, to you because of some other person that's interacting with you. So suddenly there's an activity that's going on that's autonomous to you, that it's influencing you in a way that your thoughts, they never came from outside, or at least we're not aware of. They're coming from outside. Of course, some of them do appear from nowhere, right? So that's another con connection between the, the digital virtual and the subjective virtual, you see. So there's, there's a transformation, I think of what we call the virtual or the subjective that involves other people. That involves an inter interaction at between a multitude of other subjectivities that suddenly raises questions about what the subjective is, how it's related to the objective know, August: And what the difference between public and private also, which is one of the things that Le was getting at. Absolutely. Richard: And just in terms of that, that notion of staring at something, I had this experience this morning that I woke up and I came downstairs and my son was eating his breakfast. So he is, he's eating his breakfast with one hand. On the other hand, he's holding his phone. August: Oh, yeah. Richard: Right. And he's looking at the phone as he's eating. And I had a big reaction to it. This is my kind of, cenex non-digital native side, like, what are you in? Right. Something about the way that one hand, how to hold the phone one hand had to scoop up the food. And then I thought to myself, for 20 years, he has woken up every morning and watched me do the same thing, but I'm holding a newspaper. August: Ah, yes. Yes. There's a Richard: Difference. And where's that reaction coming from in me? And it really does just raise a lot of interesting questions about the generational divide between those of us who grew up with other media. August: Yeah, I completely agree. I actually work with parents whose kids have recently had a psychiatric hospitalization. And it just seems every case, there's a battle over how much time is spent on the phone, how much time do you get your device in the evening? And the kid is so furious when it's taken away. And sometimes you wonder, well, what is so bad about, I mean, and you see both sides of this again. You know, one of the advantages of if you have a child who is flirting with someone on another continent in their room on the phone, well, that's not too bad. That's a lot better than being conservative standpoint. That's a lot better than having the kid actually with the other person down the block. And there's a certain, I think a lot of times we look at adolescence at a time where you kind of need to get through it until your impulsivity goes down and the screen is kind of a way of passing the time. But yeah, the generational is, I don't know, do what, do those resonate? Richard: Yeah. Complete, I mean, I think our whole chapter on Winnicott and especially trying to think about Winnicott adolescence we really are trying to explore those questions about Right. What the digital might be doing for the adolescent in a way that exactly in our reactive, kind of allergic way doesn't see. And I think part that's part of the problem that parents have with kids is not really appreciating, really trying to see it from the kids' point of view in some way and get it from their frame of reference, what these devices are and what kind of worlds it's opening for them. August: Yes. Definitely. Now, so you do, you mentioned, I think in part one, you provided a genealogy and you kind of gave a little bit of an overview of that, Vic. I wanted to know about, I think the listeners would be interesting to hear about San Un per, Victor: Well, I mean, black Mirror that this series it comes from is very popular. And it started a few years ago when this was not still a boom. And it really did touch on very interesting ways on issues that are rising. One of the issues that arises in this engine apparel deals with is the issue of our relationship to death, to mortality. Because the virtual, obviously, the possibilities that we have, what we fantasize about has to do with our life beyond this life. And there's idea, the idea of heaven is something that life after life and so on so forth. Well, this idea of life after life becomes, in a way, concrete with the idea of being able to, and send you apparel. The idea is that there is a program, an application through which you can experience your days of youth in perfectly convincing virtual way. And, in that episode, it is in fact a possibility that even the people that are going to die are through euthanasia or whatever, can be downloaded into the computer so that they can continue their life in that realm internally. Right. Internally. Yeah. And that, of course, is a fantasy that now has a name transhumanism. I mean, the transhumanists are thinking that that's what we're going to do. Technology is going to allow us to become immortal. And so we found that episode to be a very nicely dealt with this issue. August: Yes. Richard: And I think it also really, really anticipates Zuckerberg's, metaverse. Victor: Absolutely. Yeah. That's the Richard: People are going to spend more and more time in the metaverse and living in that kind of virtual reality simulated world, and less and less time in the actual world. And what does that mean for us as a society, as a culture, right? It always has the promise of something eternal, something a certain kind of freedom of possibility, freedom from material restraints in the metaverse that all the obstacles to our desire, regular, actual world don't exist in the metaverse. August: Yeah. So sometimes I work out and I try to run, and I don't do it very often, but when I do, I can get into these daydream or these fantasies that are just so wonderful thinking about my youth or my kids. And it's just fantastic, it's just such a thrill. Yeah. I guess that would, that's the sort of thing we're talking about, being able to, to go into that. Richard: But the difference is you could say, well, that's exactly the stuff of Psycho, what you just described, what is what Thomas Ogden would call Rey. Right? So, Thomas Ogden says, you're sitting with your patient, you want to pay attention to those reveries that are occurring. But the difference is what happens when your reverie becomes a three dimensional world. Or when your dream becomes something that you can return to and re-experience in a kind of three dimensional, alive way. Then things get a little bit more complicated. Right? Victor: Right. Yeah. They pose, I think what, what is a really a deep philosophical question, which has to do with the relationship between our fantasy and reality. I mean, fantasy and reality have been so clearly separated so that we talk about the metaphor verse and reality still as if they were two different things. One of the phenomena we're experiencing is that this separation that we're talking about, something that sends you in pair on most of Black Mirror deals with is that we're a hybrid reality. We live in a hybrid reality now. And the question is, what does that mean? What does that mean with what is objective? What is real? What is not real? What is a fantasy? So the whole issue of, of there being a separate, a clear separation between what's real and what is virtual is gone out the window. And so we need to rethink these issues. Right. I mean, what was the difference between them? That's something that we have left in the book, sort of like an open question that we would like to go back to soon. Richard: And we could just say that in psychoanalysis, just to go back to psychoanalysis is exactly what beyond discovered, that we're not just dreaming while we're asleep, beyond says that we're dreaming while we're awake. There's no separation. He has a beyond, gives us a whole ontology, I think, for beginning to understand what victor, what you just laid out there, when there's no clear division anymore. Victor: Absolutely. And Cal Debar said that the dream was that life was a dream. Right. And so did Shakespeare. No, August: No doubt. I wonder now you do deal with this some, and I think some our psycho analytic, listeners maybe thinking. Okay. Yes. And there's also, you talk about this in the book. I'm not saying this is new. There's also the unconscious or the Laconia real, there's primary process and secondary process. There's not only these two different aspects, but there's so many different ways of approaching them. So many different vocabularies. Richard: Yes. August: Tell me, in part two, you talk about the delusion simulacrum. Could you give an overview of that Victor: Overview of that? I mean, let's see. How do we bring delusion? Why do we bring delusion? Because in our debates about technology, we're always asking whether the virtual is more real than the real or the real, more real than the virtual. Right? I mean, we have this prejudice that the virtual is a false copy of the reel. And then of course, there's the other side, those that think, no, no, the virtual is an upgrade of the reel. August: Yeah. My fantasy's I'm running. Yeah. Victor: For instance, the list is a wonderful way out of that because the list talks about how it is that from a perspective, from a different metaphysical perspective, not a perspective from the, a world that is made out of substances that are permanent, but in a world that we're subs where there are no substances, but everything's a process where time goes through everything. Everything is temporal. Then the distinction between what is permanent and what is not, what is real and what is not starts to dissolve. We have to realize he says no, that the virtual is real. And so far as it is virtual, I mean, it doesn't need to be actual to be real. August: Right. Right. Victor: In that respect, then we have to shift all our categories so that we can adjust and move away from that polarization that tends to dichotomize everything instead of seeing the complexity of what we're facing. Right. So the delusion sim am is one way of thinking about the virtual in a way that is not subject to this dichotomous perspective. To see it more as part of a single reality that is traversed by time. And that is something I think that we emphasize a lot. That's something that the digital is doing, is it, feeding this new way of relating to the world where the world is no longer conceived as we used to with the traditional metaphysics as substances with a permanent essence beyond time. But rather that everything is temporal. And that also has to do with our assuming the temporality and therefore the mortality of our existence. August: And you also mentioned, now this may get to Ortega, or maybe it's still del lose, but what you were just saying reminds me, you also talk about the difference between, I guess, emphasizing or foregrounding difference as opposed to identity. Is that Ortega or Victor: That would be the traditional metaphysics as opposed to the delusion metaphysics, the traditional metaphysics that emphasizes sameness. So for instance, Plato says, right. I mean, what is it that that in essence allows you to do, is to see permanence throughout time? The ideas are permanent, the mutable things are all changing all the time, so they're inferior. So this is one way of saying, well, wait a minute, that's giving a primacy to what is permanent is emphasizing sameness and not recognizing that everything is different. Things are repeating, but they're repeating in different moments as, Heterchrosis used to say, you can't step in the same river twice. Every time that it's repeated, it's different, even though it's repeating. So that's a different repetition of difference, not a repetition of sameness. So that leads you into a world where things are always in the process of transformation rather than despite the temporal holding onto their own static permanent essences. August: Because. Richard: And we make the claim that the digital opens both of those things up. Because it really makes us, it really makes us aware of temporality in this new way. It really makes us aware of difference. But when we were talking earlier about the flat meme, it also has that feeling of sameness that, that everything in the digital is, even though it appears to be something new, it can feel like it's the same. And that gets to the question of narcissism and the question of how this self is at the center of everything. So just to lose this readiness before the digital revolution. And one of the things we're trying to open up in the book is how does the digital open up to delusion metaphysics, and how does it sort of repress at the same time at delusion metaphysics. August: Right. And you, a very interesting discussion of narcissism in all of these contexts. And also I should say there are, in addition to Duluth, you're also bringing in Benjamin and Wittgenstein. Here's a sentence I just wondered if you could, adorate on it. You say Wittgenstein three thinkers, Benjamin Wittgenstein, and Duluth, each in their own way, or interested in conceiving experience more profoundly than what representational mind allows. And they were anticipating in their methods the need to recover the capacity to face a world no longer as static and sedentary no longer as a unified cosmic substance. But as a series processes, fragments tends these lines of force in constant flux. Victor: Yeah. Well, Benjamin and Wittgenstein, even though they come from such different traditions, are both more or less at the same time, playing around with the technology of writing, with their writing methods and what we see them trying to do without really, I mean, especially Wittgenstein without really knowing what he's doing, feeling very anxious about it. I mean, the preface of the investigations is an apology for not having been able to write a proper book. Right. It's just an album fragments and so on and so forth. But he says, and this is I think is a redeeming point, and what connects him both to, to Benjamin who also wrote the arcades at the end of his life, and they were just citations and a whole lot of fragments and different things that he was almost free associating The saving fact of the investigations is that the method is precisely to be able to develop a way of thinking that was this associative rather than logical and linear. And in so far as this associative, it brings imagination. It brings all sorts of elements that have been relegated by a certain way of thinking that characterized, well, I mean the whole of Western tradition really. Right. but especially the modern age. So this is something that we identified as common to these three philosophers. There was a little bit later than, not so much later than Wittgenstein and Benjamin, but all of them during the 20th century anticipating the necessity of breaking with the paradigm of permanence and sameness and starting to think in a way that was more free, the Less we'll call it, resultmatic, that we think is important for our time and that the digital is requiring us demanding from us. In fact, August: I just keep, I don't know if these philosophers are aware of the primary process, versus secondary process, but a lot of this does seem, I keep thinking about associations that seems, I don't know if they were aware of that or referred to it or Freud or, or, or were they, Victor: It's very interesting in philosophy that, I mean, Ortega I said is very important there for me. In any case, he's a Spanish philosopher who at the beginning of the 20th century starts to talk about how things are changing and the identification of human humanity with reason, which has governed us through 2,500 years of tradition suddenly breaking down. And that suddenly we're coming to realize the importance of the body, of feeling, of intuition, of emotion, and this image that I think Freud also uses of the iceberg. And he says reason, it's just the very tip of the iceberg. All that's underneath is sensibility, intuition, everything that has to do with the body. And our time is a time of exploration of something that we have left aside, and that has remained immature. So, I mean, that's, I think where the connection is that you're seeing that Yeah. What's happening in philosophy. And that's why psychoanalysis becomes indispensable for thinking philosophically about anything in, in this time, especially technology. This age is coming to terms with the fact that, and that's mortality again, that the body is an essential element in our constitution of the world. August: Yeah. And I just think about hysteria also, right? That in terms of the connection between the body and, and representation and solving a physical problem by tracing it back to its association. So many philosophers that I didn't know about and that were great to read about here running out of time. But could we talk about Ortega conception of human beings as ontological center? Victor: Oh, yeah. Well, , that's a beauty isn't August: In one minute, please. Victor: on Richard, would you try your hand? Why, Richard: Why don't you start it? I'll, I'll come in. Victor: Sure. Ontological Center, he says we're like a center. We're made of two different natures. He says, a nature and a and a super nature, and you were natural and supernatural. We could say, now we are physical and virtual in that paradoxical, relation that we have to hold is where we find the pharmakon at its heart. I mean, we are the paradoxical complex out of which anything that we produce is going to be pharmakon. Yeah. It's going to be this tension of positive and negative that cannot be resolved. It's a paradox we have to learn to live with. It's not something we can overcome. This is what we are, that's the essence of what calling as an ontological center amounts to we are irreducible, paradoxically, a mixture of two natures that are incompatible with one another. Richard: And the more contemporary version of that would be Ernest Becker, of course. Right. And the denial of death when he describes human beings as God's with anuses. So there's there's the material there. August: There you go. I love, that's great. Yes. Right, Richard: Right, right. August: That's so great. I mean, I've read that book, but I don't remember that, but that's wonderful. Richard: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it captures the same thing. August: I think that's so, so right. That's great. So we are coming to the end of our time. I learned so much from this book. Oh, actually, I wanted to ask you, what do you think about these podcasts in terms of, I mean, clearly we're talking, but we're not together. And then they're put onto on to, they go into the virtual space. And they're there and they're accessed by people, of course. And then people listen to them in their car and they're doing other things and so forth. I don't know, have you thought much about the example of podcasts? Or what are your thoughts off the top of your head about them anyway? Victor: Oh, my first reaction is that we're talking about is this new dimension of human experience. It has a very different set of laws that they, that are based. I mean, what does it mean to be accessible to someone in physical existence? That's one thing. To be accessible to someone in the virtual. Well, that brings in the whole nature of what it means to be virtual. That we have, we are connected to it through our screens, that it does not depend on our everyday life. It depends on that new dimension that we're having to live with. That's the first thing that occurs to me when you ask about podcasts, I mean podcasts or holograms or anything that you can think of. Right. How is it affecting our everyday life, which it's transforming it. Totally. Because now we have access to, to conversations that these three guys had in some zoom place that has nothing to do perhaps with us, but we find in the internet. I mean, I know there's something about serendipity there to so many things that come up with that. Richard: Right. And then you can think about, how is it different than what Wink was doing in the forties and fifties when he was giving those BBC broadcasts Right. To mothers about their children. Now that's different because you had to be there on the radio when it was being broadcast, but as a very similar kind of feeling to what we'd call broadcast to try to see the continuity as well. If there's something different, there's something similar. August: Okay. Well, the book is Human Virtuality and Digital Life. Unfortunately, we're out of time. I really, appreciate you guys talking to me today. Victor: Very enjoyable. Thank you very much. Richard: Yeah, thank you. Okay. [END]

Adriana Alfaro Altamirano (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México [ITAM])

The belief in intuition: Individuality and authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler

Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at work in human beings that plays a key role in orienting their thinking and action within the world. As author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano notes, Bergon's and Scheler's philosophical explorations, which paralleled similar developments by other modernist writers, artists, and political actors of the early twentieth century, can yield fruitful insights into the ideas and passions that animate politics in our own time. The Belief in Intuition shows that intuition (as Bergson and Scheler understood it) leads, first and foremost, to a conception of freedom that is especially suited for dealing with hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity. Such a conception of freedom is grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self. Focusing on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that mean to regulate our actions "from the outside." Such devices, like the law, may not only carry pernicious effects for freedom but, more troublingly, oftentimes "erase their traces," concealing the very ways in which they are detrimental to a richer experience of subjectivity. According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson's and Scheler's conception of intuition and personal authority puts contemporary discussions about populism in a different light: It shows that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral, and political importance of the bearers of charismatic authority. Personal authority thus understood relies on a dense, but elusive, notion of personality, for which personal authority is not only consistent with freedom, but even contributes to it in decisive ways.

(Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Contents

Introduction Chapter 1. Individuality and Diversity in Bergson and Scheler Chapter 2. Attempts at Free Choice: Bergson and Scheler on Agency and Freedom Chapter 3. Bergson and the Morality of Uncertainty Chapter 4. Varieties of Sympathy: Max Scheler's Critique of Sentimentalism Chapter 5. Personal Authority and Political Theology in Bergson and Scheler Conclusion Notes Index Acknowledgments

Author

Adriana Alfaro Altamirano is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology (ITAM), Mexico City.

https://www.pennpress.org/9780812252934/the-belief-in-intuition/

Transcription: August Baker: Welcome. I am August Baker. Today, the new book we're talking about is The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. I'm pleased and honored to be speaking with the author, Professor Adriana Alfaro of the Mexican Autonomous Institute of Technology. Welcome, professor. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Thank you very much for the invitation. August Baker: I wanted to start with... This is a kind of strange quotation, but it's from a book by Bennett Berger, The Survival of a Counterculture, 1981, University of California Press. He's talking about the ubiquity of the term mind-blowing in the vocabulary of the counterculture. He says, "It was broadened to include a variety of experiences that shook up one's ordinary psychology, and that in blowing one's mind revealed some of the tacit assumptions on which one's ordinary organization of understanding was based." He also noted that it was first used to refer to powerful drug experiences, but eventually it had that [inaudible 00:01:25]. And I was thinking here that this is what you were doing, I felt, kind of mind-blowing in the sense of going back to these authors, Bergson and Scheler, and looking at some different ways of seeing things that maybe have gotten kind of lost in time. But we go back and think, oh, that's a very different way of looking at things. So it's your understanding of the project of intellectual history here? Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah. So I guess from the perspective of the history of political thought, Bergson and Scheler's relative absence in contemporary debates is a symptom, I think, political philosophy having forgotten some important alternatives it did not take, and perhaps could not take after the decisive wars of the 20th century. I'm thinking especially about their emphasis on personal authority, which, as I see it, would present an alternative to Weber's charismatic authority. And of course that was a very difficult subject after the world wars in the 20th century. I'm also thinking about lively and candid, perhaps, approach to metaphysics and morals, untainted by the suspicion, the distrust and the wariness that characterizes many of the philosophical schools of the late 20th century after the wars, just post-structuralism, post-modernism, genealogy, all that kind of thing, which I really appreciate and respect and learned from, but still, the book, I think, is an effort to recover key elements within ways of thought or roots of thought that were available before the wars, and to show how that enriches our present discussions. August Baker: Understood. That agrees with my understanding. You start, and of course the book is called The Belief in Intuition, and I think that comes from a quote that you start with from Hannah Arendt, who said that Bergson was the last philosopher to believe firmly in intuition. So tell us about intuition in philosophy. It doesn't seem like something that a philosopher would be espousing or saying was important. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: So the word or the notion of intuition is actually used in philosophy, actually in contemporary philosophy, in political philosophy, which is where I work, where I normally move. But it could be it's useful perhaps to distinguish the way Bergson and Scheler understand intuition from other ways in which the term's understood in philosophy and also in everyday language. In everyday language we say, "I have the intuition," I don't know that... Someone [inaudible 00:04:09] in order to say that I have the hunch or the feeling that that is the case, even if I don't have any evidence about it. August Baker: "I can't explain why, I just sense this." Yes. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Right. Or more philosophically speaking, and this is the way in which John Rawls, the political philosopher uses the word intuition, in order to identify convictions or judgements about the morality of particular actions. So for instance, the conviction that all human beings are morally equal, that's a sort of moral intuition, something that we... A conviction, or perhaps, as I said, a judgment about the morality of a particular action. Or perhaps, as people called ethical intuitionists use the word, as self-evident moral prepositions. Again, it's wrong to kill somebody else, something like that. Kant also uses the word to refer to a representation, something that we cognize and then tie to a concept. So for instance, this microphone that I have in front of me, I cognize the microphone, I have the intuition of the microphone, I connect it to the concept of microphone. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: So all those alternatives are not the way in which Bergson and Scheler use the word intuition. So for them, intuition is first of all, a human ability, or perhaps better put, a human power. It is distinct both from reason and sensibility because it's an ability or a power that addresses something that is neither rational nor senseless. So the way it puts it sometimes is that intuition aims at something ineffable and immaterial, something that slips away the philosopher's attempt to see it and grasp it. And what is that that slips away? What is the object of intuition is under sensibility or power? So in the book, what I want to say is that intuition translates in both of them, I mean, there are differences, but first into a certain conception of freedom, a certain conception of individuality and a certain conception of authority that we should be interested in exploring. So that's what intuition means for them. August Baker: Okay. Let's start with individuality. They, as I understand it, offer a defense of sorts of individuality or they like individuality. And I think a lot of listeners are probably thinking, "Oh no, individuality. That's going to talking about rugged individualism and that's hardly what we need." How are they defending individuality and what does that have to do with intuition? Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah, so perhaps I can say something about Bergson first here. Individuality has to do with, in his case, with what he takes as the primary datum of experience, which perhaps some of your listeners are familiar, perhaps others are not, as movement and change. So for Bergson, that's the primary experience that we have. And that means that our experience of our inner reality is like that as well. So movement and change means that our inner self is primarily multiple, and that makes it difficult to grasp and difficult to define or to anchor some definition. August Baker: Right. And when I originally thought about inner multiplicity, I thought, oh, that will mean that we have different drives that are conflicting, but it's really not that at all. Before you get to Scheler, I was very interested in this idea of this cinematographic illusion, basically. But continue on. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Actually, what I was going to say is directly related to that. So as you said, it's not about drives, and in that sense, it's not a Freudian conception of the self or a Jungian conception of the self about the bundle of sensations or whatever. So it has to do with time. It has to do with the centrality of the notion of duration and time, in Bergson, for an adequate comprehension of individuality. So precisely due to the importance of time in Bergson's thought, in order to understand his theory of individuality, it's important to say something about his theory of memory and the role that the brain plays in it. So according to Bergson's theory of memory, the past never disappears. It's constantly there and it's never dead, but on the contrary, prone to constant transformation. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: So what he calls a cinematographic illusion is the idea that the past disappears, like the images of a film disappear from the screen, and for Bergson, that is wrong. The past doesn't go away, he says. Instead, he proposes that the past duplicates the present incessantly. And so his view is that the past is preserved in its entirety, and the job of the brain is not to remember, but to forget, to stop perceiving what is past. August Baker: This is what I mean by blowing my mind. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah, I know. August Baker: Keep going. Yes. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Okay, so what does it mean to say that the past does not disappear? So it's truly not the case that he has any hopes of humanity eventually being able to travel in time or something like that. So Bergson's idea is that we stand at the bottom of a corner of this sort of inverted cone; he calls it the cone metaphor. And this cone represents the constant accumulation of the past. At each one of the levels of this cone, we find the totality of the past. So it's not that the base of the cone is like the remote past or whatever. So at each level we find the totality of the past, but at different degrees of contraction or expansion. So he says that, more specifically, the cone displays different levels of consciousness at which we experience different ways of relating to our past: more pragmatic, more direct or more convoluted or complex. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: And for Bergson, the only possible access that we have to individuality is by digging tunnels into this cone, so to speak, exploring the multiple ways in which we can traverse its different levels. And that is the other idea that I present in the book. Bergson teaches that the past is those who mix their labor with it, so the more you appropriate your past by digging these tunnels, the more you put yourself in a position to exercise individuality. And that's what I've called Bergson's alternative labor theory of value. August Baker: Right. There was this quotation, he says, "Every moment of our life presents..." I'm getting this from your book. "Every moment of our life presents two aspects, actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on another. Every moment of life is split up as and when it is positive, or rather it," I guess, life, "consists in this very splitting." And another point was, if you could talk more about this, I think, this idea of inner diversity as opposed to sort of an outer homogeneity. One of the quotations is, "Our tendency to form a clear picture of this externality of things..." Well, "and the homogeneity of their medium is the same as the impulse which leads us to live in common and to speak." Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah. So there's two ideas in what you said. First, this whole idea of the past duplicating the present. I mean, that is admittedly very obscure and people have made fun of Bergson and this theory that the past has not disappeared, that it's like a dimension that we are not able to perceive but it's there, still. My sense, I don't know to what extent, my sense is that he did believe that literally. But in any case, that's physically correct or not, I guess the effect is of thinking, this alternative way of thinking about time. It sort of undermines the idea of a more plain or flat relation to the past just through mirror images. And here, I don't know if you've seen this series, Black Mirror. Well, it's a Netflix series and there's one episode in which they propose that there's a digital mechanism which is sort of installed in the brain called the grain. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: And that allows people to watch on demand selected scenes of their pasts in a film. And their whole life is recorded, with their eyes serving as cameras that shoot everything they see. And whenever they want, they can scroll through the grain, that's how they call it, watching redux either through their own eyes or projecting them in whatever screen is available so that other people can see what they've recorded through their eyes. So from a Bergsonian perspective, the past is not really preserved in this example of Black Mirror. Rather, it is, so to speak, [inaudible 00:13:10] to us for the cinematographic evolution of movement. While we passively sit and watch what the camera, in this case, our eyes, has captured for us. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: But his idea is that actually a proper relation to the past is toilsome and is constant, and it's by laboring with our past constantly and with all the demands that that has every day, not through images that are easily seen, but through a toilsome exercise that involves effort and expectation, activity and passivity, engagement and patience, that allows us to... So his point is that by relating to our past, we can create our future, and that's what individuality and freedom are ultimately about. So I guess, this point, aside from his very strange and [inaudible 00:14:02] fear of the past is that dealing with our past in the proper way, not in the easy way, we can actually build our individuality and create our future. And in that sense, his conception of individuality is individuality as self-creation through a proper relation to our past. So that's what's interesting, I think. August Baker: Right. No, I see what you're saying. And I guess before you go to Scheler, I think one of the things you point out is that it is somewhat deflationary in the sense that it's not just that we have this will that we can exercise. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: That's a deflationary conception of self, that's what you mean? August Baker: Yes. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah. And as if the individual will was something simple. And I guess, Bergson's point is that, and that's why it's not this individualism, easy individualism that perhaps people see in liberal theory or liberalism, or in capitalism and liberalism together. But it's a more complicated and not easily available conception of individuality. August Baker: Right. It's a defense of individuality, but not the typical defense and not one that leads to... Or it's a celebration or a emphasis on the provenance of individuality without it leading to individualism. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: I think that's right. August Baker: And for Scheler, this was fascinating and mind-blowing. I guess, in my notes I tried to summarize it saying, 'emotions perceive values.' And I don't know if that was an oversimplification. That was fascinating to me. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: And I think that's correct. So for Scheler, instead of an emphasis on time, I mean, Scheler knew Bergson and was interested in him, but so for him, the possibility of experiencing inner diversity lies primarily in what he calls perception of value, in German, [foreign language 00:16:03]. So his view is that we perceive values just as we perceive this microphone, this glass of water, through our emotions, through our feelings. And in that sense, emotions or feelings are sort of like receptors of something that wouldn't be available for us if we didn't have this dimension of experience, which is our emotional dimension. He's very schematic, he's in that sense, very old-fashioned author, and he proposes a hierarchy of values from the more material to the spiritual dimension. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: And the parallel certification of our emotional life according to different types of feelings respond to different spheres of value. So at each level, feelings are, as I said, receptor organs with which we perceive the corresponding values. And the importance of this hierarchy lies, for Scheler, in that individuality becomes possible only through the proper identification of the different ranks of value. So yeah, that's his idea. August Baker: So individuality was one, agency, freedom, just proceeding through your excellent book. If we go to agency in chapter two, I thought let's talk about Kant and maybe you could tell the listeners about the Gallows Man example and awareness of the ought in your alternative awareness. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah, so I don't know to what extent the listeners are going to be familiar with Kant, so perhaps I can clarify first Kant's views, so that we can show how then what I propose in the book based on Bergson offers a different route to morality based on the phenomenon of temptation. So Kant famously held that morality reveals us freedom as a fact. So we know the moral law first and then we know ourselves to be free. That is why morality, according to Kant, is the ratio essendi of freedom. Freedom, in turn, in his view, makes morality possible because it is our capacity to reject our empirically determined interest that is... inclination, drives, in favor of a moral course of action. So he says that freedom is the ratio essendi of morality. And Kant illustrates his theory with an example of a man who is demanded by his prince on pain of immediate execution to give false testimony against an honorable person whom the prince would like to get rid of. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: So this man, famously known as the Gallows Man, is, like everybody else, empirically determined by multiple desires and instincts. Yet, Kant says, when a man is presented with the prince's mortal threat, he's capable of overcoming what determines him empirically, because as soon as he becomes aware of his duty, duty to save the man who's about to be killed by the prince, he discovers freedom. And that is Kant's famous awareness of the ought, the famous fact of reason which obliges us and at the same time makes us discover our freedom. And in that sense, freedom is forced upon us, he says. We ought and therefore we can. And thus, as the example shows, freely, we do. So what I do in the book is I propose a different reading of Kant's mini-story, which I approach a bit narratively. It's a vignette, really, in Kant, not a full story, but I approach it like narratively a sort of criminal case with Kant as the main witness, telling us what happened, what the prince commanded, the mental state that the Gallows Man was in. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: We have to determine like a detective or a member of the jury what really happened there with the Gallows Man. So according to my interpretation, in which I use Bergson's phenomenological approach to human action based on intuition, and again trying to read Kant's report as closely as possible, the Gallows Man discovers freedom not through the categorical character of the moral law, as Kant's own interpretation proposes, but through the extent to which he experiences his own capacity for action. So if you agree, I guess we can perhaps review very, very quickly for the audience, the few lines that I focus on in Kant. So very quick, brief quotation. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: So Kant says that, "Once the prince has threatened the Gallows Man, we can ask him," so the Gallows Man, "whether if his prince demanded on pain of the same immediate execution that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to destroy under a possible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to assert he would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him. He judges therefore that he can do something because he's aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law would have remained unknown to him." So there seems to be a chronological priority of the Gallows Man unhesitating awareness of his agency. He must first admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him to sacrifice himself, and therefore he judges that he can do it. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: So I could, therefore I can. And only later he judges that he can do it because he ought to do it, the famous, "I ought, therefore I can." So I play with the idea there is an awareness of the 'could' prior to the famous awareness of the 'ought,' and that's the whole idea, that it's our awareness that we can do something, or in that sense, the feeling that we're tempted to do something that allows us to discover freedom. Of course, in this case, the Gallows Man is tempted not by a drive or an inclination in the normal sense of the word. The relevant experience of temptation here is to save an innocent person. So the Gallows Man is a martyr because he's tempted by justice, and that is the first categorical experience, so to speak, that we can get in the example. So it's a reinterpretation of Kant's own example that I propose, following Bergson's theory of morality to say that temptation is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom because it enjoys, chronologically speaking, prior status. August Baker: You refer to a phenomenology of temptation, a phenomenology of hesitation. There's that moment when the agent realizes that, okay, the prince is commanding me to do this and I could not. It's that momentary pause there? Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah, the realization that we could actually disobey the prince and save the man, not out of a sense of duty, but out a sense of possibility. I can save that man and therefore I do it. And I mean, normally, when we think about temptation, for instance, when we think about addiction, we think of that as very oppressive and something that traps you in a way. And my point in this chapter is to show that of course, I mean that's of course true of temptation, and in the sense of addiction, and that kind of things, of course can trap a person and make that person unfree in very horrible ways. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: But what I want to propose is that temptation is multiple. On the one hand, yes, it can trap us, when, for instance, you're addicted to something. But on the other hand, it can make you feel your agency, the fact that you're not determined by your drives, that there's some sort of hesitation, that there's some sort of margin. And in that moment of hesitation, that moment of temptation in that sense, you can feel your agency, even if, of course, if temptation, you fall and you miss that moment of hesitation and you become addicted in a more oppressive way, then of course that's lost. But that's the idea. August Baker: That's very helpful, thank you. I want to move to chapter three. There's so much in chapter three. The morality of uncertainty. Could you tell us about maybe Bergson and virtual instinct, fabulation, another mind-blowing... Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah. So perhaps tell you first, so the main ideas of the chapter, the main idea, and then I can go on ahead to- August Baker: [inaudible 00:24:51] Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah, exactly. And then I can talk a little bit about virtual instinct. So the idea is that for Bergson, and here I'm still talking about Bergson, uncertainty provides a kind of opportunity for agency. So it's a condition of possibility for agency. And this means two things. First, the idea that reality, what surrounds us, sort of mirrors the human agent, and so uncertainty is a characteristic of reality, provides an opportunity to model our agency in a more dynamic, less determined way. So reality as something uncertain gives some flexibility to our agency. Another way of putting this is uncertainty would offend a completely defined and established personality for which only the categorical would be apt. On the contrary, contingency's not necessarily an embarrassing match for what remains supple and finished anyway. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: So that's the first idea. Second idea is that different ways of understanding uncertainty allow us to model our agency differently. So a moderate approach to uncertainty allows us to forge an identity capable of relying both on habit and improvisation and in that sense remain flexible. Those are the main ideas of the chapter. And then the part on virtual instinct. So what Bergson says is that an animal, a non-human animal, has only instinct and therefore, that in a way there is no uncertainty for this animal. But when we have intelligent animals, intelligent in the sense of having language and therefore not relying on instinct only, then in a way that because we are intelligent, uncertainty appears, uncertainty as the gap between our expectations and our plans and reality. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: And a Bergson's idea is that for these kind of animals, intelligent animals in the sense of having language, so human animals, we don't have instinct in that sense, in the sense of animals, but we have virtual instinct. And such an instinct, he says, will allow us to cope or deal with the discouragement in action that falls from the limits of rational insight into the future. So virtual instinct is sort of like what we have instead of the proper animal instinct that allows us to cope with that disappointment. Here, Bergson deals with all this literature of anthropology dealing with "primitive" people, which was very strong at the time. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: And he says, well, these "primitive people" are not that different from modern civilized people because we all have this virtual instinct, although in different ways. For "primitive people," this myth-making faculty, this idea, think about taboos, these myths and fabulations that allow them to make sense of the world. And from the point of view of civilized men, using the language of the 20th century, that sense, ridiculous or preposterous. But actually we are very much like them, that's what Bergson says. And our conception of chance, he offers very interesting analysis of our conception of chance and how it's actually very similar. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: It performs a very similar function as the taboos, for instance, in primitive people. And the idea is that chance, even if we like to think that it's very scientific and statistics and all that kind of thing, is actually a sort of half-personal idea that allows us to relate to uncertainty in a more personal way. So when we say, "Oh, you were very lucky. Luck was with you," we sort of personify the idea of chance or fortune. Well, actually Fortuna is the more clearly personal conception of chance in that sense. And he says, if you see how modern civilized people use the word chance, you see that it's like a partner, it's like a peer, something that comes with you and that allows you to relate to uncertainty in a more personal human way. August Baker: It's this mystic cause for the "civilized." Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah. Yeah. August Baker: And I will leave this to the listeners to read the book, but there was this really nice turn of phrase. First of all, you introduce the French philosopher and poet, Jean-Marie Guyau, and I'll just leave chapter three with this quote of yours: "While chance gives rise to expectations and predictions, risk, the wild twin brother of chance always elicits our love or our aversion." That was a very nice turn of phrase. Guyau will be talking about risk instead of chance. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah, Guyau is a very obscure personality and figure, but I use him to contrast his idea of risk with Bergson's idea of chance, and to show how if our approach to uncertainty is not moderate, if risk, contingency and insecurity are given a preeminent focus in personal and political thought, when they're turned into the main problems to be addressed, we are usually left with two options: either total insurance against risk at the cost of liberty, so think of Hobbes' Leviathan, or the absurdity of experiencing risk for the mere joy of it. And what I propose, that Bergson's conception of chance offers us a more moderate way to approach uncertainty. August Baker: Right. Oh, boy. Let's see, I'd really like to spend time on chapter four, which is Scheler's conception of sympathy versus Smith's, but I think we have so little time. Let's move on to chapter five on authority. How can a person who has this inner diversity be bound by authority? Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: So the last chapter is a reflection, well, it's an effort to answer that question. What kind of authority is best suited to address the individual, in Bergson and Scheler's sense, the individual that is understand as multiple, not the liberal individual understood as having only a will? And my answer is that the kind of authority that is best suited to address this individual is not that of the law, but that of another person. And by this I do not want to say that the law cannot properly address us, but that we would be losing something very important if we neglected personal authority. So this yields a conception of personal authority that, compared to Bavarian rational authority, or perhaps more recently for political philosophers or legal philosophers, [inaudible 00:32:08] epistemic authority, is allegedly better at speaking to us meaningfully, more persuasively, more compellingly as an authority. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: And that corresponds to their personalist outlook. I mean, it's a conception of authority known as [inaudible 00:32:26]. And of course, I mean, today I don't think I need to say much about the dangers associated with personalist politics. Today we hear a lot about charismatic authority and how democracies die, populism, the dangers associated with strong men, and all the lessons we should remember to avoid tyranny. So all that's real. But my interest in [inaudible 00:32:52] and specifically in the figure of [inaudible 00:32:55], that they both explore and analyze and use as a pedagogical resource that can teach us how to emulate admirable, exemplary people who exert an extraordinary pull on others, is that in the midst of all the fears associated with charismatic and personal authority, we might very well lose sight of the fact that democracy also depends in crucial ways on these type of figures. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: And actually, many people have indicated this within the traditional political thought, a lot of people have talked about the importance of moral pioneers in one of the drivers of changing the ethos of society. For instance, very recently, Naomi Klein in her book On Fire, acknowledges the superpower of Greta Thunberg in order to spark the Green movement and [inaudible 00:33:49] climate change and all that kind of thing. And of course, the classic example is Rousseau's figure of the legislator, without which the foundation of a truly just political community would be impossible. And what I look for in Scheler and Bergson's respective conceptions of [inaudible 00:34:05] is to show that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral and political importance of those figures, who in the famous words of Rousseau, can compel without violence and persuade without convincing. So that's the interest. August Baker: Right. And you talk about an ethics of imitation as Scheler's defense of an elusive aristocracy. Could you spend a moment of all these on Bergson's modern defense of ostracism? That was very interesting. And on the value of humility, I guess. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah. So perhaps I could say something about this ethics of imitation or emulation that I identify both in Bergson and Scheler, and which I think, going back to your point about individualism are especially apt correctives to that kind of problem. So think of, perhaps our audience has heard this term of ethics of authenticity that Charles Taylor articulated in the nineties. And his idea was that of course, modern individualism and the narcissism and competitiveness and egoism that goes with that is very troubling and we have to think about that. But Taylor's idea was that there is an ethics, an important moral ideal behind that individualism that needs to be recovered in order to understand the force of individualism. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: And his point was there's a good version of it that needs to be recovered so that we can actually be properly guided by it. And that was his ethics of authenticity, the idea that each one of us is trying to become what oneself truly is, and to find or build, perhaps, I don't know what the right word is, our own authentic, unique personal self. And interestingly, what I find in Bergson and Scheler is a sort of ethics of emulation that tries to find a way of moral growth and a way to individuality, tries to find individuality by way of imitating another. August Baker: Which is what we do, indeed. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yes. I mean, on the one hand, today with social media and all that, a lot of followers what you want to have, but that's what you are as well. So you might better find the right way of following and the right way of imitating others. And their point is that by way of emulating, rightly emulating other people, which of course doesn't mean copying their way exactly or literally, but entails an exercise of an analogy, like what would whatever, whoever do in my situation? Of course, you're not Jesus, you're not Napoleon, you're not Greta Thunberg, but what would that person do in my case? And that exercise they propose combines, on the one hand, an acceptance of humility an acceptance of personal authority and the existence of exemplary people. On the other hand, it's an exercise of applying that example to your situation, and in that sense, getting to know yourself and your own particular situation, but in a more humble way. August Baker: And in that way you can really feel, as opposed to a rational law. Right? Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Yeah. In a way that you can identify with personally, instead of following a rule of thumb or general rule. Which again, doesn't mean that there is no place for general rules or laws or whatever. That's not my point. The point is that there is some dimension of experience that can only be addressed by other people or the example of other people. So yeah, I think that's interesting, especially in the context of where individualism still is a concern, just as in the nineties with Taylor. And I think it's an interesting alternative. I mean, I really like Taylor and his idea that we need to actually bring forward the best version of that individualism, but perhaps this is actually, it's an interesting alternative way, the ethics of emulation, that we could try in order to address that individualism. August Baker: That's fascinating. The book is The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler. Thank you so much for speaking with me, Professor Alfaro. It's been a pleasure. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: No, thank you for the invitation. It's been a pleasure for me.

Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA)

Freedom, resentment and the metaphysics of morals

An innovative reassessment of philosopher P. F. Strawson's influential "Freedom and Resentment."

P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper "Freedom and Resentment" is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology. In Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals, Pamela Hieronymi closely reexamines Strawson's paper and concludes that his argument has been underestimated and misunderstood. Line by line, Hieronymi carefully untangles the complex strands of Strawson's ideas. After elucidating his conception of moral responsibility and his division between "reactive" and "objective" responses to the actions and attitudes of others, Hieronymi turns to his central argument. Strawson argues that, because determinism is an entirely general thesis, true of everyone at all times, its truth does not undermine moral responsibility. Hieronymi finds the two common interpretations of this argument, "the simple Humean interpretation" and "the broadly Wittgensteinian interpretation," both deficient. Drawing on Strawson's wider work in logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, Hieronymi concludes that his argument rests on an implicit, and previously overlooked, metaphysics of morals, one grounded in Strawson's "social naturalism." In the final chapter, she defends this naturalistic picture against objections. Rigorous, concise, and insightful, Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals sheds new light on Strawson's thinking and has profound implications for future work on free will, moral responsibility, and metaethics. The book also features the complete text of Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment."

Transcript

August Baker: Welcome to the New Books Network. This is August Baker. Today I'm speaking with the American philosopher Pamela Hieronymi, who's professor of philosophy at UCLA, and we're talking about her Princeton University Press 2020 book, Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals. It's part of a series that Princeton University Press has called Monographs in Philosophy, edited by Harry G Frankfurt. The description is short argument-driven books by leading philosophers. This book is short, 130 pages, 100 roughly from Professor Hieronymi and 30 of it is a reprint of Classic Article by someone named PF Strawson, his article Freedom and Resentment from 1962. You can see the title of her book is Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals. The Freedom Resentment refers to this Strawson article. Professor Hieronymi has done a very close read of the crucial few pages in that article, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. One of the things that was said about this book is that it will from now on be essential as a reference for reading Strawson's paper. It would be difficult to think you could or would want to read Strawson's paper without looking through what she's done here. Secondly, the other title of the other part of the title is and the Metaphysics of Morals. By that, I think what is meant is metaphysics of morals would be the underlying picture of morals. So that in the course of looking at Strawson's paper, she's looking at the underlying nature of what we're really doing when we hold each other morally responsible. For example, one Angela M. Smith said this book, this is an exciting and groundbreaking book that has the potential to reshape our understanding of the nature of morality and our practices of holding one another responsible. I'm very pleased to speak with Professor Hieronymi about her book. Welcome to New Books Network. Pamela Hieronymi: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me here. August: I have to say, set time every day or in the days that I had, I set aside time to read this book. I always really look forward to it. It has a sort of to take a classic philosophical article and go through it step by step. It's like being reading Plato or Aristotle, but without it being dated today. I really enjoyed it. Anyway, the basic question here that correct me if I'm wrong, professor, is basically on the one hand we hold people morally responsible. But on the other hand, when we learn that someone has a illness, say Charleston's example is schizophrenia, or they have a brain tumor that affected them, we naturally feel differently about them. It affects us the way we feel about whatever we thought they did that was morally illicit. On the other hand, we also all agree that we are, put on quote, determined, that is we take our genes and our environment and you get our behavior. So the question becomes why are we holding anyone responsible? Is that fair to say is the basic questions that's being addressed here? Pamela: Yes. He's addressing the question of free will and moral responsibility as it appears in its contemporary garb, which is, as you say, a question about determinism and the possibility of freedom, or what he's in fact addressing is determinism and the possibility of moral responsibility. It's interesting that you say that most everyone agrees because in the philosophical community, there are a bunch of people who I think would not agree that we are space divides between those who are compatibles, who think that the truth of determinism is compatible with us being responsible and those who are incompatible who think that the truth of determinism is not compatible with us being responsible. Of the two, the incompatible position is the very natural one. When in my undergraduate class I put forward determinism as the claim that the movements of each macro physical object are determined by what has come before and which is in turn determined by what has come before so that given the complete description of the physical universe at one point in time, together with the laws of nature, you could, with enough computing power, deduce the complete description of the physical universe at any other point in time. That picture seems to students very threatening to our freedom. It now seems to them that we are not free and it seems to them that it's no more sensible to hold any of us responsible than it would be sensible to hold the responsible person whose behavior we learned was determined by a tumor or by some other physical set of forces. That's the natural position to arrive at the first pass intuitive position is that if determinism is true, we couldn't be responsible. Peter Strawson really thinks that's a nonstarter given his background picture of the nature of moral responsibility, which as you said is what I'm using the word metaphysics to pick out the nature of a thing. That's a very surprising position that Strawson occupies to think that this very intuitive position is kind of a non-starter unearthing that underlying picture of the nature of what it is to be responsible that allows him to just dismiss this very natural challenge is the task of the book. August: Before we get to Strawson's position, why is that? I mean, I could see it could be threatening in a way because it's so different than the way we think, but it also seems liberating in the sense that you might call radical acceptance is something you hear these days, radically accepting everyone that some people wouldn't find that threatening, they would find that re relieving. Pamela: Maybe the way in which people find it threatening is that it seems to them that if the in future is already entirely fixed, given that the past is what it is, what happens people feel is no longer really up to them where they don't really make a difference. They start to feel. August: I understand. Pamela: this is what you're getting at, and I think it's correct, it's also the case that at least some of our moral intuitions seem to be predicated on the idea that we are free in a stronger sense and that if we aren't free in that stronger sense, then we don't deserve certain forms of punishment or harsh treatment. It's that realization that that sort of retributivists punishment may not be in place. But that I think from my point of view would be the kernel of truth and the relieved feeling you were suggesting. That there's something, I wouldn't characterize it as radical acceptance, given that I think a great deal of our moral practices remain in place, but I would characterize it giving much greater scope than we'd currently do to something I'd like to characterize as grace. August: That sounds good. Now, I would like to just, if possible Strawson uses schizophrenia as an example, I was thinking another example that we could use think of it is what's called now borderline personality disorder, which would be someone who has a very volatile mood, very prone to anger, very prone to instability in relationships, going from idealization to complete devaluation. When you're dealing with such a person, once you realize that they have this diagnosis, you're going back and forth between getting irritated and then also thinking that the person, oh, wait a second, this is something the way they are determined. Do you think that's relevant to this discussion? Pamela: Absolutely, yeah. It's going to be a case that I think sits right at the border in between cases that are clearly exculpatory and cases that we might think are cases of determined viciousness. One of the things that I didn't first find this attractive, but I've come to find attractive about the view is that Strawson's view I think makes that borderline difficult. I think maybe it is difficult and so I think it maybe it's the strength of the view that it reflects that difficulty. August: Exactly, yes. Strawson starts off saying, let's move from punishment and moral condemnation to such things as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings. Let's keep before our minds what it's actually like to be involved in ordinary interpersonal relationships. It goes on to these distinctions if you could elaborate on reactive participant attitudes to objective attitudes and the so-called resource that we have. Pamela: Yes. The way he makes his argument that the truth of determinism is irrelevant to the question of whether we would or should go on holding one another responsibility is to try to bring into focus as he puts it, what it's like to be involved in ordinary interpersonal relationships, which is to say he wants to identify what it is to be responsible, what it is to be a morally responsible person, or some as foster sometimes put it a morally responsible agent. He wants to identify that as being a term in certain sorts of interpersonal relationships being a part of certain sorts of relationships. He thinks that the fact that we're part of relationships in which we matter to one another in this distinctive way in which we're subject to these reactive attitudes, which I'll explain in a second, he thinks that's just a natural feature of humanity and not one that needs to be justified or not. So not one that stands unjustified if determinism is true. But backing up, what does he mean by mattering to one another? What are these attitudes has been the main legacy of this paper, which has had a tremendous legacy, but it's made impact has been to bring into philosophical discussion this distinction between reactive attitudes and a more objective attitude. The reactive attitudes are responses we have to our perception of the quality of somebody's will towards us or other people. So roughly reactions we have in response to whether or not we or others have been respected or disregarded. These are things like resentment and indignation and distrust on the negative side or admiration and trust and gratitude on the positive side. They contrast with more objective attitudes. For example, if I find that my car has a flat tire. I go try to drive to work and I find that my car has a flat tire because some nail I ran over a nail, I'll be frustrated, I might be somewhat angry, but if I find that somebody has slashed my tire, I will feel quite differently about it. If a board bears my weight when I need to cross some crevice, I might be relieved that the board held me up. If somebody supports me, I will be grateful. He points out this fact about us, which is extremely interesting, which is that we have a set of attitudes or a quasi-emotional responses that seem custom-made for our form of sociability and for our form of relating to other people as part of our society. They are attitudes that will in fact function to constitute a set of expectations that we hold one another to. He in fact identifies social expectations of respecting one another with our proneness to respond in these positive and negative ways when those expectations are violated or superseded. It's not that we all sit down and drop a set of moral laws and publish them. Instead, it's that we are in a system in which people react to us in this way, and being reacted to in these different ways is what holds those expectations in place. August: So the emotions which we feel are natural, which come naturally to us, are reflecting or are the demands we're making on. Pamela: It's the flip side of those demands. Yeah. So it's like they're two sides of one coin. So one side is we think, you know, you shouldn't lie, you shouldn't cheat, you shouldn't steal and the other side is we respond with indignation or resentment if you do those things. He's thinking that there is this moral and interpersonal framework of expectations and demands that is essential to our being social creatures who live in a society. Now, it's very important that what's natural is just that we have some or another system of these demands. The specific ones that are in existence in any particular culture that's not, not what he's interested in. He's not interested in the content. He's just interested in the general form that human sociability is such that we care about how we figure into other people's worlds. We have expectations and demands that other people will give us an hour due regard, and the manifestation of that is in this form of reactive attitudes that we have, that's the underlying metaphysic of morals in brief. August: You say here it is not generally been noticed that Strawson is sketching in metaphysics of morals. One he paints by observing our actual practices in his style of descriptive metaphysics, which is an interesting term. Can you say a little bit more about that? Pamela: I can say a little bit, yeah. In earlier, I think a couple of individuals... August: Sixty-one, I think, yeah. Pamela: Which is one of his very well-known books, individuals. He in the preface of that I think sketches what a distinction between what he calls revisionary and descriptive metaphysics. Then he starts categorizing philosophers as whether they're revisionary meta-physicians or whether they're descriptive metaphysics, where the meta-physician is again somebody who's trying to discern the nature of things that you would not discern just by doing experiments, and the visionary meta-physician is the one who pays less attention to how our actual thought and language and concepts and practices and just tries to make sensible framework, a sensible picture for us to inhabit. August: Interesting. Pamela: Whereas the descriptive one is the one who comes and my picture of this is like almost as an archeologist with his soft-bristled brush and tries to sweep away debris of conceptual clutter and dust that might have accumulated on our concepts and our ideas and unearth the actual form of our thought about something. Strawson sees himself as working in that second way. August: So here I'm going to ask you a question, which it went over my head, and it may be impossible to answer in a podcast, but one of the things you said was Strawson here claims that a minimal morality is a condition on the existence of any social organization. Moreover, he thinks that the demands of such a system will be pretty regularly fulfilled. Then you say, we have here the ingredients for a transcendental argument moving from the existence of society to the satisfaction of the conditions required for it, the typical observance of a minimal set of rules. Then if you're really brave, there's a footnote, we can compare this to Donald Davidson and WVO Quine. I think I'm asking you too much, but is it possible to sketch an answer to that? Pamela: No. I mean that's really the heart of the form of argument that he's after. A transcendental argument there, all that means in that sentence is it's an argument from the existence of something to the actuality of the conditions for its possibility. If something is actual, then whatever was required to make it for it to be possible must also be actual. Here he's saying there's certain minimal standards that have to be met for there to be a society. What are those? You can't have widespread deception, you can't have widespread killing, you can't have widespread theft. At a certain point, if there's too much of that, people will fend for themselves and not come together in the cooperative way required for there to be a society. That's pretty minimal. Right? August: Right. Pamela: But if you have a society at all, the thought is there's some minimal set of expectations that will be met and so you can make this transcendental argument from the fact that we do have a society to the fact that we do have some minimal set of expectations and they're generally satisfied and the comparison to Quine and Davidson, so Quine wanted us to think about the possibility of radical interpretation. The thought is you're parachuted down into a culture that you don't speak the language. How are you going to start to translate that language? The thought is, in order to do that, you have to assume that most of what's said is true. August: I understand. Pamela: If you didn't make that assumption, you wouldn't be able to translate. But from there you can get to the conclusion that speakers couldn't always be wrong. August: Good. Pamela: That's the argument that's being made. Strawson now thinking about the possibility of us being responsible, he's thinking of the threat of determinism as the threat of saying that instead of responding to one another with these participant reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation, that in light of the truth of determinism, we should instead opt for more objective attitudes of just frustration and disappointment, say the way we would react to a natural disaster. Though we do sometimes react to people like the schizophrenic as though they're in this more objective way, he thinks that we do that only, this is my argument and it's controversial, but I argue that the way to understand him is that he's saying that we do that only in the outlier cases, in those cases in which it's no longer possible to really interact with somebody in the usual way. The range of humanity is wide, in the case of small children, in the case of advanced dementia, in the case of certain outlier cases, trying to interact with somebody in the usual, having the usual expectations, and demands and the usual responses to that becomes unworkable. In those cases, he thinks we move to the more objective attitude, but he's thinking that couldn't be the case all the time. It couldn't be the case that everyone's an outlier. It couldn't be the case that everyone's exceptional in the same way that it couldn't be the case that everything anybody says is false. So we already know, he thinks that for most of us, most of the time, this form of life is workable and all it needs to be is workable. There's no question of its legitimacy. As long as you're asking about the form itself, there might be questions of legitimacy about the particular demands we make of people, the particular ways we hold them responsible might be unreasonable. But engaging in some system like this, he thinks as long as it's workable, there's no problem with it and it's obviously workable, so there's no problem with it. August: That's very clear and helpful. Let's back up a little bit because I think one of the interesting things about this article, and you say you remember reading it for the first time, he's rhetoric, which is he makes his central argument, which it sounds like it can't be true when he first makes it. As you say, it depends on outliers and who would think that a philosopher would be talking about outliers? There's a bit of the rhetoric of he surprises the reader because he knows the reader is thinking that he's missing something and then he says, you may think this, but if you're thinking this, you have no idea what he says. Could you take us through that, the central seemingly vaile argument and is rhetoric along that? Pamela: Yes. August: I was going to say, he says the participant attitude and personal reactive attitudes tend to give place and it is judged by the civilized should give place to objective attitudes insofar as the agent is seen as excluded from ordinary human relationships by abnormality. But it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not self-contradictory. That abnormality is the universal condition. That's so surprising. Pamela: It's super surprising. He says this may seem altogether too facile and so in a sense, it is. Then he says, but whatever is overlooked and this dismissal is allowed for, and the only possibility that remains. Then he goes on. That was the paragraph that led me to think, I do not understand his argument here and I need to sit down and spend what ended up being a few years with it trying to unearth what would've led someone to write those sentences in that order. What were the assumptions in his head that allowed those sentences in that order to seem like the right thing to say? So the idea that it cannot be a consequence of any thesis that is not self-contradictory, that universality is that abnormality is the universal condition. That's just a fancy mid-century English way of saying it can't be the case that everyone's abnormal. Then he earlier said that the only reason we exempt people is that they're abnormal. If it can't be the case that everyone's abnormal, then it can't be the case that we have reason to exempt everyone. That argument goes very quickly and it's overlooked by everybody because as you say, it relies on this idea that we exempt the abnormal and no ethicist is even going to see that claim that the basis for exemption is abnormality. That's just a nonstarter from the point of view of an ethicist because it opens up an objectionable form of relativism, which I try to deal with in the last chapter of the book. The challenge of the book, in a way, is to try to make sense of why Strawson thinks he can make this argument that quickly. I think once you see the underlying picture with which he's working according to which it's just part of our natural sociability that we just a fact about us, like the fact that we breathe air and live on land that we engage with one another in this way. Once you see that and accept his starting point, then I think the argument does come very quickly. August: You point out that it depends on our capacities, right? If we had different capacities, we'd have different reactive emotions. Pamela: Yes. This is one of the things that I think is one of the more interesting upshots of having spent so much time trying to work out what might be on this man's mind, is that the argument, the underlying picture has the feature, its the feature that allows them to avoid the bad consequence about determinism, that our expectations and demands are custom fit, so to speak, to whatever capacities we happen to have. So the way I illustrate this in the book is with a thought experiment. I start with the idea that as we are now, drunkenness often is grounds for either exemption or using the resource, we didn't talk about that, but that's a kind of version of exemption. If you're out with your friends and for an occasional night on the town and somebody gets really drunk and says something mean, a lot of times we just say, they were drunk, whatever and we blow it off. If occasional use becomes regular abuse, we might then have to start to use our resource to work at keeping ourselves from reacting to that person in quite the same way. If we think of them as an alcoholic and as suffering from a disease, then we think of them as exempted in certain ways. We suspend our usual expectations for somebody who is drunk, just the ways I think that Strawson's framework would predict. But then I say the thought experiment is this, suppose that we all came naturally equipped with only that degree of attention, impulse control, and memory that we now have when we're pretty inebriated. In that circumstance, things might seem very similar to an outward observer because people would not respond to certain outbursts as though they were with resentment or indignation or what have you. But in that circumstance, it wouldn't be because we were all always suspending our reactive attitudes. It would instead be that the expectations and demands had adjusted to fit our ordinary capacities. The picture that emerges, and this is one that I like a lot, I think is true, is that morality, moral expectations and demands are more like a hymn than they are like an opera. An opera you could write for your star performer, whereas a hym needs to be written for the B-minus congregant. The morality is one size fits all, and it's written in a way that captures most of us. It doesn't capture all of us, right? I'm a terrible singer and so I'm not going to be able to keep up with even the B minus hymns. But the hymns don't adjust to find me and my husband's a terrific singer, and the hymns don't adjust to show off his capacities, they're just made for most of us. The thought here is that our ordinary interpersonal expectations and demands are similarly made for most of us and they can and will adjust to the capacities on the ground. There's ways in which that's very attractive because you can have subcultures and sub-societies in which say, in home for the memory impaired, you're going to have a different set of standards. Maybe in a juvenile detention center, you're going to have a different set of expectations. August: In a nursing home. Pamela: The expectations could also rise if as a culture we become more sensitive or more generous or what have you. It has a downside, and this is the relativism I meant to speak to earlier, which is that it doesn't seem that there is, in anything I've said so far, anything to stop those expectations and demands from finding the lowest common denominator. So in a situation in which people are, certain classes of people are very, it's just ordinary to treat them badly, it seems as though this picture, this metaphysics of morals is going to end up saying that that's okay. That's not a form of disrespect. The reason why this interpretation didn't occur to the ethics reading the paper is that, is that it's so obvious that this interpretation has an apparently devastating problem. Like I said, I try to give Strawson some resources to cope with it in the end. August: In the last chapter, when you bring in ideas. I would love to talk about the last chapter, but since we're time-constrained, I was very interested in that. I think what you do, is you seem to defend Strawson, but then you also are playing chess against yourself. You're also thinking of the best possible argument against him and presenting one after the other, which is interesting. The resource, if I'm thinking about dealing with someone who has a borderline personality disorder, to me the resource is to find more specifically, but I shouldn't use the example of borderline personality disorder, but it's that moment where you think someone is normal, but you feel like you have some will where you can not go down that reactive path. Pamela: You step away as Strawson puts it, sometimes to avoid the strains of involvement, or sometimes for curiosity, or sometimes because you're engaged in social policy making and you just have to accept as a fact that people are going to be crappy sometimes and think about how to handle that. The resource happens when you start treating a person as an issue, as we say. Like, oh him. Yeah, he's an issue. August: Strawson has this central seemingly fast argument, and then we talk about our natural reaction is why statistics matter. He's concerned about whether the resource might be generalized. Is that... Pamela: That's my interpretation, yeah. August: Then goes into this social naturalism. I guess this might be the last question, but I thought it would be interesting for the listeners to hear about, I guess at the beginning you, you had a kind of human interpretation of Strawson's argument or Wittgenstein and you end up with this social naturalism, which is neither. Could you go through those? Pamela: Yeah. In a way, we've already covered the ground for it. The article has been interpreted up till now, largely in one of two different ways. One is a broadly human way according to which Strawson's just saying that given the facts of our psychology, it's not possible for us to react to people any differently and so because it's not possible, we shouldn't worry about it. That's a very dissatisfying philosophically position. But he does say things in the paper that seem to say that the Wittgensteinian response is the one when we were talking about Quine and it's the idea that you can't criticize a practice as a whole using terms that rely for their meaning on the existence of that practice. Now that's a controversial claim, but the idea is rough, it makes no sense to claim that the game of baseball is foul in the sense that's constituted by the rules of baseball. Foul in that sense is something that makes sense within the game. You can't get outside of the game and apply it. The Wittgensteinian argument is saying that Strawson's accusing his opponent of making that sophisticated conceptual error. August: That would be the question of whether it would be moral to suspend our reactive attitudes. Pamela: It would be the question of whether it would be just for us to continue in morality. The thought would be questions of justice or questions within morality, just like questions of being foul or within baseball. August: Got you. Pamela: In the same way it makes no sense to ask whether the game itself is fair or foul, so it makes no sense to ask whether morality itself is just or unjust. That's closer to the interpretation that I think I end up with. But in a much later set of lectures, lectures given, I think in the 80s, Strawson himself goes through Fume and Wittgenstein and puts forward his view which he calls social naturalism, which he contrasts with both human Wittgenstein, but then tries to set out his own picture, which is roughly that there are certain aspects of our existence that are not up for questions of justification. They're natural facts of our existence. They set the terms for the questions of justification that we can ask within them. One of the examples he likes to use is the case of induction, the case of believing that the future will be like the past. Hume famously pointed out that we can't justify the principle, and believe that the future will be like the past because it seems as though the only reason to do that is because the future has been like the past. Things have been the way they have gone before, but that's question. Strawson's thinking that there are certain facts about us that we need to accept as setting the terms or the framework within which we can then ask questions of justification. But Wittgenstein, thinks that those could change. It's not the case that Hume thought they were just a few things and they were given to us. Wittgenstein thought no, they're socially given and they can evolve historically, but that doesn't mean that we can, so to speak, leap outside of them and question them. That's a rough overview. This is the topic that I feel like I have the least firm grip on and it's what I'm now really most interested in. August: Oh, interesting. Pamela: But that's the rough idea. August: Well, I said those are my last two. I have so many more questions, but it's a very great read. It's like going back in time and thinking about these basic principles. Congratulations on this great book and I really appreciate you talking with us today. Pamela: Thank you so much. I'm so pleased that you enjoyed it. It's a very close read, so I'm glad that it worked out for you. August: Thanks. [END]

Owen Flanagan

How to do things with emotions: The morality of anger and shame across cultures

An expansive look at how culture shapes our emotions—and how we can benefit, as individuals and a society, from less anger and more shame. The world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good. In How to Do Things with Emotions, Owen Flanagan explains that emotions are things we do, and he reminds us that those like anger and shame involve cultural norms and scripts. The ways we do these emotions offer no guarantee of emotionally or ethically balanced lives—but still we can control and change how such emotions are done. Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame, and he observes how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better. Through comparative insights from anthropology, psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy, Flanagan reveals an incredible range in the expression of anger and shame across societies. He establishes that certain types of anger—such as those that lead to revenge or passing hurt on to others—are more destructive than we imagine. Certain forms of shame, on the other hand, can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty. Flanagan proposes that we should embrace shame as a uniquely socializing emotion, one that can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot. How to Do Things with Emotions celebrates the plasticity of our emotional responses—and our freedom to recalibrate them in the pursuit of more fulfilling lives.

"How to Do Things with Emotions is a welcome corrective to Anglophone philosophy's tendency to frame Western presumptions as universal. And it presents an appealingly sensible moral program."—Becca Rothfeld, New Yorker

"This is no ordinary book on emotion. Flanagan sees society as ailing, and believes that two emotions, anger and shame, are the problem. He takes us on a tour of philosophical thinking about, and cultural difference in understanding of, emotions, all in the service of convincing us that emotions are things we do. If so, he says, we can learn to do anger and shame differently, and be better off for it. Reading this engaging and well-crafted book gave me hope. What a gift from an author."—Joseph LeDoux, author of The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

"This is an urgent book for our times, both inspiring and provocative. Flanagan invites us to work on our emotional style, to tamp down our anger, and to develop a mature and responsible shame. His argument involves a subtle theory of what emotions do and why we can intervene, and considers what culture and anthropology can teach us. We can learn to be different. And we must."—T. M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God

"In this state-of-the-art account, Flanagan examines the multilevel constitution and cultural diversity of emotions. He builds on the anthropological observation that shame and anger are complex moral emotions—not only felt, but also enacted and performed. In the West, and particularly in post-Trump America, Flanagan contends, 'we can do shame better.' Likewise, our ubiquitous rage can be channeled into reasoned, constructive anger. This forcefully argued book takes philosophy into the field."—Andrew Beatty, author of Emotional Worlds: Beyond an Anthropology of Emotion

"How to Do Things with Emotions offers a fascinating commentary on contemporary American culture, a thorough social and cultural analysis of the emotions anger and shame, and a critique of the current state of moral philosophy. Taking us on a tour of how anger and shame are done across different times and places, Flanagan provides broader horizons of possibility and practice. This is an important and overdue update of the moral philosophy of emotions in a multicultural world" —Batja Mesquita, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, University of Leuven

"This fine and important book is driven by a genuine passion for reforming the misuse of anger and shame in our WEIRD culture. It is nourished by Flanagan's exceptional mastery of scientific and philosophical thought as well as of the writings of the wisdom tradition—Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. Personal, clear, and occasionally pleasingly epigrammatic, How to Do Things with Emotions is both powerfully argued and politically timely."—Ronald de Sousa, author of Emotional Truth

"How to Do Things with Emotions is a breath of fresh air. With delightful, insightful, and witty prose, Flanagan describes North American views of anger and shame, and introduces us to these emotions in other cultural contexts through a philosophical lens. He asks how we might learn from these 'varieties of moral possibility' to improve our own ways of experiencing and expressing anger and shame in contemporary times. A must-read for all who wonder about non-Western ethical systems and their importance for emotional life."—Jeanne L. Tsai, Stanford University

Transcript

August Baker: This is August Baker. Today, I'm speaking with Owen Flanagan, James B. Duke, distinguished professor of philosophy and professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. Talking about Owens 2021, Princeton University Press, How to do things with emotions: Subtitle is; The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures. Welcome, Owen. Owen Flanagan: Thank you, August. Nice to be here. August: So, you say that in your multicultural environment, no one is supposed to be allowed to tell you what emotions you can have, and which ones are good for you, but it seems to be that's what you do in this book. Owen: I guess, I don't know if I would want to say that in my multi-culture no one thinks they can tell you what emotions to have. I think that actually people endorse certain ways of, what I call, doing the emotions, left and right. So, people come from all kinds of different traditions. Lots of human life is filled with people telling us that we should not be so shy, or not be so angry or not, be so sad. So, I think those are all different ways in which we, sometimes, for very good ends, tell each other, and teach each other about how things are going for us emotionally. My concern in the book actually is not so much to tell people how to do the emotions the right way, not my way. It's that, at least in the case of anger, this is the case I'm most confident about. I feel that we're stuck in a bad place at this time. That we live in an angry world, people don't listen to each other well, and in my experience as a teacher and just an ordinary person, when I've talked to people about this over the last 10 or 15 years, it's very common for people to say, "Well, that's just the way the world is now, or that's the way anger works." So, part of my overall idea is not to tell people quite my theory of how they should do anger, but about some of the problems and pitfalls that I think we are in, in terms of living in a culture in which one author calls it, the age of anger. That there are some kinds of anger that we might want to reflect on and be more deliberate about, and do some self work and some social work on doing them better. So, it isn't like I have a formula for how to do anger well, or a set of norms, but I think we're in a bad place with respect to anger. It would be good to reflect on it. That's the way I put it. August: Robert Solomon's talk about the transcendental pretense, which as I understand it was the idea that you can look into your inner nature, and find out human nature. You can look at yourself and find out about human nature, and you're not having any of that. You want to look at a lot of different cultures and expand, and look inside other people's way they seem to see world. Owen: Yeah, I think that's fair. I don't have any objections to sort of thinking about what makes us tick from our own perspective. But what I've been interested in for a while, and this could just be frankly, a motivation inside philosophy, the discipline of philosophy, is Alfred North Whitehead said, "The safest generalizations to make about Western philosophy is that it's, but a series of footnotes to play off. It's kind of an exaggeration, but it's an interesting thing to reflect on because if true, what we have is that about a billion people in the world have been influenced by that particular lineage. If you take all of Europe, and all of say North America, that's about a billion out of 8 billion people. So, other people have been brought up in different philosophical traditions. So, part of my idea is that, sometimes when we're in trouble, we want to figure out things like, "Am I responding to some universal feature of human nature, which I don't doubt there are some. I mean, the emotions seem to be good examples of where we actually get something mother nature through evolution has given us some basic emotions. The evidence looks to me once we expand and look to other cultures, other philosophical traditions, but also just how cultural psychology and anthropology inform us that people do the emotions in many different ways across cultures, and some of them might be appealing upon reflection. That's sort of the method, yes. Like, what Bob Solomon called the sort of transcendental pretense that a good philosopher could kind of, in some sense, get himself in touch with the nature of his soul, the nature of everybody's soul, and somehow gain transcendental access to the mind of God or whatever. My brand of philosophy is more naturalistic, shall we say, looking at cultural psychology, anthropology, and that sort of thing. August: So, one of the things you talk about is, a lot is weird cultures. What weird culture? Well, August, I've mostly been, really in philosophy in my career, but because of early interests, and in things, like human nature, I've usually had appointments in psychology departments, and different times I've been more or less involved in psychology. But one thing that people will tell you who are in psychology departments is they go around joking that, "We better hope that American or North American College sophomores are representative because so much of psychology is based on information we get from them. So, around 2010, I don't want to swear that the day is right. Joe Heinrich, who was at that time, at University of British Columbia, and he's a psychological anthropologist, and some colleagues did a study in which they asked two questions. Number one; how much of the published work in psychology is based on North American samples? The answer was over 90%. Then the second question they asked was, "How representative should we think that North American college sophomores are?" The answer to that is basically they're about the least representative population in the history of humankind. Why? We're Western. We're educated, weird, W-E, industrialized, only 2,000 years old rich and Democratic, 200 years old. So, the idea is that most of our surmises about the nature of persons have been an exercise among extraordinarily intelligent people, but nonetheless, in the North Atlantic. So, the danger there - so this gives me, as if it were a permission. I think, "Well, how much variation is there? Again, literacy is only 5,000 years old. Modern humans have been around maybe for 240-250,000 years, but we've only been reading and writing recently. In fact, in Plato's dialogues, you may know this, but, when people ask the question, "Was Socrates literate?" The answer is not obvious to us. He could recite any play as any good educated person could do. He could recite from Homer and Sophocles, and so on. But he worried actually, about reading and writing because he said, "The kids are going to go to hell in a handbasket because they'll lose their memory," and that's clearly what he had. So, so even [crosstalk] August: So, that's why he never wrote anything. Owen: Never wrote anything, yeah. Socrates, Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, none of them ever wrote anything. It's interesting. The weird thing is, and I think what has to happen is we need better and better instruments in trying to figure out what is universal about human nature and what isn't. We just need to do a lot more cross-cultural work to see what keeps turning up, and what doesn't. I think clearly what people like Paul Ekman called the basic emotions following out on Darwin, there are some things that just seem to go with the equipment and you discover everywhere, happy, sad, scared, angry, surprised, disgust, contempt, maybe, but it's a very interesting question. How do they get built then once they come into the world? How are we instructed to express our emotions whether we're encouraged to express our emotions? Some of these things are genderized and racialized. I mean, it's all quite interesting, and quite complicated inside, cultures, and then across cultures. August: Then there's the role of emotions in morality. You say, morality is an invention we created to meet certain needs, especially the need to live convivial and social lives. Am I right that you view us as doing things with emotions using emotions to enforce moral structures? Owen: Yeah, all those things. Let me pull them apart a little bit, but that's it. So, the first thing, August, the reason for the motto about how to do things with emotions is that there is one picture of emotions. It's very firmly in philosophy, and you see it to a certain extent in parts of psychology. But this is the idea, it goes back to Plato. So, Plato has this idea that well, where each of us are born with two wild horses inside us. One wild horse is the force that wants food and sex and water. The other horse in you is your temperament, which will include your emotional dispositions, your tendencies to anger or fear, and so on and so forth. The project of human life is you can't control those horses at first. They just as it were, do their own thing. What a human does eventually is he becomes like the charioteer controlling those two horses. Success in life is rational control over those emotions. Then you see this in Descartes, even a similar kind of model, Descartes calls emotions the passions of the soul. The idea is literally we're passive with respect to these things. So, anger is like a reflex. It'll just happen to you. What you can control is whether you act on it or not, or fear will happen to you. You can control whether you act or not, and so on and so forth for the emotions. So, one of the things I was trying to do in the book is emphasized, there's something useful about that picture. There's no doubt because it can feel that way, but also that emotions are not like pupil contractions or knee jerks one can by way of, for example, therapy, work on one's emotions, and have them and do them differently. One can do self work, or what Confucian or Buddhist philosophers would talk about mindfulness or self-cultivation. Then finally, one can do sort of social working in an environment by changing sort of social structures. I think, well, I'm older than you, but maybe not by so much, maybe you were told this when you were a boy. I was told, "Restraint of tongue and pen." So, that was a little advice, and it's sort of quaint when you think about it, right? But if you and I got mad at each other in the olden days, we did have to actually, well, phoning was expensive. So we didn't do that regularly. So, then we might send each other a letter, and that takes time to find the letter. You cool down by the time you write it, and then you have to get a stamp anyway, and it takes forever. So, sometimes there are things that happen like in the current world social media, which allow people to just react probably way too quickly than we were designed to react, and it has bad results. So, these are all different ways, so part of the idea is to say, "We all learned possibly, at our parents' knees, in our preschools, in our schools, rules and regulations about how to do the emotions. Some of the; how to do the emotions are enforced by other emotions. That is when parents tell the kid at the restaurant, to use his inside voice, or when you say, "Stop misbehaving or share with your sister." Anger does play a role in helping to build a morality, but emotions I call moral, it's not because they are used all morally at all. It's just that they're often used inside morality. So, one philosopher has this idea that if you look at our morality, the two emotions that you think govern it, when he talks about 'ours', he means something like North American morality. He thinks that it's governed by the emotions of anger and guilt. So anger, if you do something that is morally bad, I have a right to be angry at you. If you did something morally bad yourself, you have a right, and you should be feeling guilty about your action. He analyzes - his name is Allan Gibbard - He analyzes guilt as anger turned inward. So, that's very interesting that it would mean our morality is very much built around, you know... August: Anger. Owen: …anger. You could tie it into the God of the Old Testament, if you want to, things like that, but yeah. August: It seems that, I don't know in North America or in the weird population, there's a built-in idea that emotions are internal and individual, and that's not shared in other cultures. You talk about emotions as things we do also scripts... Owen: Right, yeah. August: …syndromes. Tell us about how you view emotions in them. Owen: I think this question that you're asking is a really important one. For different purposes, one can analyze these things narrowly or widely, is another way I put it. Many people, of course, distinguish the feeling of an emotion from the behavior that comes from the emotion. That's a common thing to distinguish. I think that leads us to overemphasize the internal phenomenological feeling aspect of the emotions. So, one reason I want to have us at least include dispositions to behave is if you think in terms of evolution, why do we even have these emotions, especially given the data, the evidence that we express at least, the basic ones especially. Now this matters, okay? Well, the reason is that emotions are obviously communicative among people. So, if you and I are hiking together, and you see my face go scared because I just saw a rattlesnake, that alerts you. Then we both head for the hills together. If I come for your stash of food or your partner, or whatever, back in the beginning of time, you give me the look that tells me, "They'll be hell to pay." So, these things are regulative. They're useful in part because they involve, almost always, that the feeling does involve a disposition to behave. Some kind of disposition that we don't always carry through on the dispositions, and we can stop it. But my overall view is that because emotions evolved to get us to do things, they still serve those functions. We're still, we're mammals after all, and what most cultures are trying to regulate when we all work together on emotion regulation is both how the emotions feel. Like sometimes we'll say to each other, friends will say, "I know you're upset, but I think you're more upset than the situation requires." So, there I'm trying to help you as my friend to gain some perspective about how you should be feeling. We do that a lot to the children. We say to the children, "You shouldn't be so sad. It's not the end of the world that you didn't get more than your fair share of M&M's," and so on. We also know things, we do try to bring the behavioral dispositions under control as well. So, I had this, I called a wider, functional point of view. It's also based on some recent research on emotions, which focuses on the following sort of fact. We're all familiar with situations in which you might say, "I'm sad about something," to a friend. In fact, when you and your friends start talking your friend might say to you, "I don't think you're sad so much as you're angry." Then you might say, "Oh yeah, that's a good point. I am angry. So, this is back to Solomon's point. It isn't like we're always completely definite on which emotion we're feeling until sometimes we see both what caused us to be in that state. So in fact, I'm not sad because I'm actually angry that the friend did that. I'm just supposed to, I think I'm just going to cry, but actually, I'm going to cry because I'm angry. I'm not, because I'm sad." I think those who are bringing in the behavior, helps us see into more real-life ecology. The work that emotions do. August: In a footnote, you say, the motto emotions are things we do awaits refinement. You say there are many things we do that are not emotions, or standard examples of emotions. We climb mountains, spell words, etcetera. One might think that in real life most of these doings are suffused with feelings, emotions, and moods. So, the I guess the idea is when we talk about these emotional scripts, we're talking about cases where it's evident that the emotion is driving the doing, in some sense, but [crosstalk] Owen: Really a good question. Maybe that's why I really still need the footnote because you're totally right, that everything we do in life is filled with effect. Now, it's interesting that psychologists over world historical time have tried to distinguish between what they might call cognitions or thoughts, and on the one hand versus perceptions. I see the apple versus emotions, versus moods, but even the thought, two plus two equals four as close as we come to a pure thought. Yeah, if you're taking a test in first grade, there's all kinds of emotion, and feeling, So, I guess I'm the kind of person who's inclined to say, "There's never been a moment in my life that I haven't been in some affective state or another. I think I should welcome it as your suggestion when talking about the emotions or emotional episodes, I'm thinking of episodes that are sort of really heavily laden with emotional, reactivity, something like that. August: Right, and now, we're going to talk about anger and shame, and both of these are used to tell people we don't like what they're doing. So, they can be used either for morality or in some sense, disciplinary. They may be supporting whatever the hierarchy currently is. Owen: Yeah, that's right. August: Tell us about the two cultures that you focus on, and how they use debarra[?] and I don't know how to say the name of the other one. menakjubkan [?] I don't either. I'll leave that out now. I'll describe them as Indonesian and Madagascar because they're hard to pronounce. But yeah, no, thanks for asking that question. So, well, first of all, let me just respond to what you just said because it was so important. Yeah. I think what's important to say is really what you emphasized, what you just said. I like that a lot. To say that when I call, there's one sense of calling them moral emotions, which just means they get used a lot to enforce a more normative or moral order. Now, the course, they could be Neo-Nazis or fascists, or white supremacists, who use anger to keep down the black folks, will say. They'll even have what are called feeling rules by anthropologists that'll be like things like, ops, aren't getting uppity? So, there's all this kind of, yeah, so all emotions can be weaponized by, and used for ill or for bad. So, there's no question about that. So, in terms of the two cultures that I talk about that the anthropologist talked about, I sort of have two different ideas running together in the book, which, of course, you know because you read it. One is, when I'm worried about anger, and the degree to which people are angry. The kinds of anger that are out there that I think are unhealthy, and some that I think are important and healthy like anti-racist anger, anger for justice. But there's other kinds of anger that are also very common, one I called payback anger. That's where you hurt me, and I zap you right back. Hurt you right back. That I think is very common, and much more easily controllable in people. Then there's the other kind of anger, I also call into question, and you and I have talked about this offline. I call it, using Carol Harvest,[?] I think her name. She calls it, the ventilation is view. I mean, it's kind of like a general cultural permission that I'm entitled to my emotions. My emotions will be what they will be, and I should just express them when I have them. But that will mean sometimes when you're in a bad emotional state, I, just by being around you, will be, unfortunately, the recipient of the negative atmosphere. So that, whereas, the first one, payback or revenge anger, I think is bad just because it doesn't improve the situation, typically. It does harm to another person's feelings. If you're a good person, you probably shouldn't want to do that too often. The other kind just seems self indulgent, but what I do then is sometimes I go to philosophical traditions or theories, which are well worked out by articulate philosophers from the past like, in Stoicism with Seneca or Buddhism... August: Aristotle. Owen: …or Aristotle, these wise thinkers, but other times, I just want to go and look out at the world itself and see what's out there. So, the two groups that I talk about, and I really depend completely on the authors of the relevant paper, but these are examples of cultures. The Indonesian one is one in which the people think that anger is the work of the devil, and that, therefore, people should never be angry, including never be angry towards your children. There are some other examples of this in the literature. For example, there's a nice book called 'Never In Anger' by Jean Briggs, which is from the early 70s, which is about Eskimo cultures in which it's just the worst thing you can do is to express anger to other Eskimos. In this culture, the Indonesian one, adults just don't get mad at each other, and they don't get mad at the children. However, they do use shame to socialize the children. So, it's interesting. They will say, "Oh my God, can you believe what junior did?" They'll call attention to the family about the bad deed, but anger is prohibited. The other culture I talked about in Madagascar, is the opposite. They use really powerful, fear-inducing anger to socialize the youth into the norms of life, like you said earlier. Some of the norms that you're teaching kids, many of them aren't moral or sometimes etiquette. Just take your hat off in school. Don't be a slob. Clean up after yourself, these sorts of things, but those are just two examples. What was interesting to me about, just take the case of Debara who are the Madagascar group, even though they use anger to socialize the children, they tend not to use it reciprocally, adult-to-adult, or at least, this is what's reported. So, it's used as a socialization tool, but it doesn't play a major role in their life, and it doesn't look like they indulge in revenge-anger on any regular basis or the kind of indulgence of pain passing, just because I feel lousy, I'd been hurt. There'll be norms against that. So, yeah, those are two examples of what turned out to be lots of different interesting differences among the way different people do. August: Right. One of the fascinating points was about how a Japanese person will often respond to anger. Owen: Yeah. Now, obviously, in places like Japan and America, there's lots of different scripts going on, but the Japanese one is fascinating. Yeah, so the general finding is this, that usually in terms of majority practices, American and German parents meet their children's anger with anger and it escalates until something happens. I don't know what happens there. In Japanese culture, children's anger is met with not engaging. Maybe what behavior, as we used to talk about, is extinction because we don't pick up on it. It's not permissible so you're not even getting my attention with this temper tantrum. Now, that's interesting, August, because in psychology books, it's usually said that anger is an approach emotion, and if you ask Americans, "What do you want to do when you get angry at someone?" People say, "I'll punch the guy in the nose." If you ask Japanese people, they'll report, the disposition is to leave the room to get out of the unpleasant circumstance. So, these are interesting things, and you can see how they could get embedded early on. They become part of the taken for granted background of your life. Everyone does it this way. You're mutually legible to each other this way. You'd be acting weirdly if you were to engage, say a Japanese child, I'm angry with. So, that's part of the idea of the book, right? Obviously, you know this, but it's just to say it can be helpful sometimes when you're trying to find your way out of a practice that's causing you difficulty. If you can find or locate that there are other people doing things a little bit differently than you, that might be resources for you to think about. August: Absolutely. Yeah, and one of the other things, - this is a footnote also - the most common American style results in escalating anger, that is anger being that with anger. Meanwhile, Japanese anger is conveyed with a similar ideology of personal blame and responsibility. It does not normally involve giving the other a piece of one's mind, and it is commonly met with smiling, nodding, and acquiescence, which I actually can remember in my own case. I didn't realize that it was cultural until now, but I can remember getting angry at a young Japanese when I was in graduate school. A Japanese graduate student, and yeah, his response was to smile. Owen: Yeah. There are all these different practices. The first time I remember going to East Asia, similar kind of thing. Someone said to me, like you know how in America someone hands you a business card, and you just stick it in your pocket they said, "No, no. There, you take it with two hands, you read it carefully in front of the person." That's interesting that you have that. When I see this, I remember your story reminded me once about an interesting, 60 Minutes show I saw years ago about an African-American family in Brooklyn who were wanting to find the best school for their 10 or 11 year-old-son. The best school they found was in Chinatown, and they shipped the kid off to Chinatown. This particular Chinatown school was mostly the kids of restaurant workers. It was bilingual, English and Chinese. They scored the third highest in English language scores in the state of New York, and highest in math scores. I remember the 60 Minutes interviewer went to the principal and said, "You must be so happy. You must want to clap and jump up and down." She was just so, and she said, "We're pleased that we're doing our job," but you just couldn't get her to have the emotion that would have been the right emotions to have as an American. It was very refreshing, and to see a very different attitude towards... yeah. August: You point out that in our multi cultures, we're observers of lots of different ways of doing things day-to-day. Lots of ways of doing emotions. Owen: Yeah, I think we are, although not being - I remember as a boy, I think I mentioned this. Where I grew up outside of New York City, my neighborhood had Italian Catholics, Irish Catholics. Nearby were black people and there were some Jewish people. I just remember when I would go to my friend's mother's house, that's where I would see these different emotional displays or where I'd see my Italian friends, the men would kiss and hug each other, and I'd think, "We don't do that." Yes, but every day, when you get on a subway in a big city of London or New York or something, you're around people whose inner lives are probably very different. Not only their beliefs, maybe their religious beliefs, but also the way they engage the world is probably pretty different in many cases from what we have. We have to reach, though, a modus vivendi where we can get along and we share a certain level of norms. August: Right. So, there are lots of types of anger that you like, and there are some that you say, quite want the reader to question, "Could we do less of this?" So, the two that you are questioning, one the one of them is the pain-passing anger. The other one is revenge. Owen: Yeah, the pain-passing is where you're ventilating. You're angry and you vent on people who didn't cause you to be angry. You're just around them. The other one, the first one is the kind of revenge anger. [inaudible] I'm worried about. Yeah. August: So, I guess, and we talked a little bit about this offline, but I understand this pain-passing perfectly. You are really in a bad mood, and you're really angry, and there's only one person there, and for some reason, I want that person to get angry or upset, too. I mean, I don't even know, is there a theory about why people do this? Owen: I don't know. It's an interesting thing. You want them to get angry too; that's an interesting one. You could maybe hope that they don't get angry, but you can't stop from making them angry you're being busy. August: Right. Owen: Then there was this view of, you're right, ventilation is good. Right, at one time, the story was, "Oh, don't keep your emotions bottled up. That'll lead to cancer or something." Also, this idea that your emotions aren't wrong. Owen: Yeah, good. August: So, when that happens, or you point out like, when customer service on the phone, right? You get angry at them, and you say, you've talked to people, and you say, you talk to people and say, "How often does that work out for you?" It doesn't, right? But it just seems so ingrained - I mean, my one comment, and we talked a little bit about this is that, there is the question about whether the person on the other side is going to be affected by it, right? You can try to pass your anger, but if you look at the situation, it's really two-sided. One thing is, "Should we ventilate?" The other is, "What do we do when someone is ventilating?" Owen: You just put it beautifully because these things are so unbelievably complicated because like you say, it takes two to tango, and whether the other person is good at doing what you want them to do or not. So, we know, there's Folia[?] the people can get into. I think that you just said a whole bunch of things that I think are really interesting. I like the way you put this. Emotions can't be wrong. That is when a piece of ideology that at the one level, there's part of me that wants to say, "That's right." Just accept. You're going to have, whatever emotions or feelings you're having, then you're going to have that feeling. That's the way it goes. On the other hand, that can lead to a certain kind of self-indulgence because we all know that sometimes even for ourselves, we will judge that the emotion is, as the word, ridiculous. I don't know. You just think, "Oh my God. Why do I...?" I was just on my way to the party, and I just scratched my newly polished shoe. No one in the history of the world ever noticed that, but I am rip shit crazy, insane, furious." So, in those cases, we do think that we're having more of an incorrect response, and we want to bring ourselves back to center. There are emotions, I mean I really do get, both just speaking personally. I mean, I understand, schadenfreude is an interesting emotion, right? August: Right. Owen: The person who brought my dad's business down, and now I hear he's dying of a painful cancer. Well, I get it. I get the impulse, and it probably is evolutionarily hard to completely overcome. The reason the Old Testament is so compelling, Lex Talionis, eye for an eye, is because it speaks to a fundamental aspect of our emotional nature. So, one doesn't want to ask, call upon us to be entirely different than our nature makes us be, but I do think that sometimes, like I say, I think of those two kinds of anger that I am concerned about, I think that the modern world makes the world in which I grew up and restraint in tongue and pen. Now, the fingers can immediately respond to any latest outrage with further outrage. So, you and I talked earlier about Americans meeting anger with anger, and escalates. Well, we have technologies now that they're making worse, maybe a natural tendency that we have. So, I don't know how to get control of that, but as the kids say, "Knowing is half the battle." August: Right. We've used up so much time, let's talk about shame. You think that shame gets a bad rap. Now, you're against shaming. Owen: Yeah. August: But you see a conceptual difficulty in the way people view shame. I guess shame is usually - okay from one point is, we can talk about shame and get into lots of nuanced discussions about the difference between shame and embarrassment, but it is kind of interesting that most people use them synonymously. So, it's not clear what we're doing when we're talking about these things. as different in a nuanced way, if people don't know that. But anyway, when people talk about shame, they talk about, it's partly a violation of a community, or a group. I think often people think of it as something that leads to stigma, and it seems like maybe the threat is there of some sort of ostracism at first, or some sort of you're not allowed in the group. I think that I have also heard that the difference between shame and embarrassment is that shame is, you think that you are a bad person overall. I thought you've made a very interesting point that that doesn't necessarily follow, at least the last one. Owen: Yeah. Good, that you bring out all these issues really nicely to see. So, the first thing you said is exactly right. A lot of people, I mean, again, maybe we're just going to think at first here about people, like you and me, well-educated white men in America or something like that. If you ask around how we distinguish shame and guilt, shame and embarrassment, we're not that good at it. Although I think you pick up on exactly the right point. If I'm embarrassed, I'm just kind of embarrassed. You're not going to ostracize me though, whereas if I have reason to be more than embarrassed, but be ashamed, you might actually kick me out of the club. Okay. But there is a lot of overlap, and there's also overlap between shame and guilt the way Americans actually use it. Although the official theory about shame, because of what you said about the ostracism possibility is that, it involves something like thinking I'm a bad person overall. The reason I got interested in this one is a little different from how I got interested in anger. Because I've been working a lot, August, on just different cultures and philosophies, I've been aware for a long time that you never see in Chinese philosophy, or Indian philosophy, discussions of what we would call guilt. You always see discussions of what we would call shame. I was also aware that shame is almost universal in those cultural traditions, which may be that modern people in China and India are heirs and heiresses too. That would constitute about 3 billion people on earth. So, I kept my eye on that, and I kept thinking, "Well, they don't think of it as involving the bad person overall, but you're right that in Western psychology, it tends to carry that connotation. Part of what I thought I could do here was to show how much of an outlier view that was in the rest of the world. Then even to reflect on how, if we feel like, if we use the word 'shame' and socializing children or even on our own case. Like the pope, Pope Francis this morning in the New York Times - I mean, he didn't do it in New York Times - in the New York Times they reported that Pope Francis apologized to Canada for the schools that they had that the Catholic Church runs 70% of them for Indian displaced children, Native American children. The pope said he felt great shame. Now, the pope isn't saying, "I feel like I'm a bad person overall," or the Catholic church is bad overall. I think in the same way, if a parent teaches a child that they need to learn how to share the Legos, A; it'll be more fun, but B; that's what a nice good child does, it shares. They should be ashamed if they don't share. They're not saying you're a bad person overall. They're just saying, this disposition of not sharing or being selfish is something, which we want to encourage you to get over it. So, that's sort of on one side of things. Just the mere fact that an emotion, which we think causes addiction, anorexia, bulimia, suicide attempts, all kinds of stuff, we think that because we've defined it as, "I think I'm a bad person over all." August: Right. Owen: But I don't think most people use shame that way or think of themselves when they feel ashamed about something. I just don't think that's the common usage. August: No, I thought that was very well-taken, and I guess the idea would be, you can use shame, say with your children saying, "When you do this, it discredits our whole family. Not that, that means you're bad forever." Owen: Exactly. August: This here, it has the effect of discredit. It implicates me, the whole family. That doesn't mean, it does not necessarily mean, you're bad forever. Tomorrow's fine; in an hour, you'll be fine. Owen: That's right, exactly. Yeah. I think that's really nice the way to put it because that is always what some people will say. Well, and you do see, obviously, I'm not asking for us to be like confused people, where there was that story about the ferry that sank with a lot of school children. It's off the Korean Coast about 10 years ago. The principles of the school, the mayor of the town, the owner of the ferry company, I mean, it was what we would call an accident, but a lot more people than we would think should have taken responsibility. But your example of the fact that my child's behavior at the friend's house overnight, reflects on me, is simple to say, it's true. You've informed the child about the scope of the problem. Not that he's a bad person over all. August: Right. Owen: Then my hope, and this is where I'm reaching with this whole thing is that I did one of the motivations, the practical motivation of the shame part of the book was both to bring out this general intellectual point, but also to wonder a little bit about how it was, and how unfortunate it is for especially young people, that there are so many people who live as it were, shamelessly, and play it fast and loose with the truth, or with their role as a public servant. I was thinking specifically of recent politicians, current politicians, and thinking [crosstalk] August: Have you no shame, sir? Yes. Owen: Have you no shame? Yeah. It isn't just that someone like Trump should feel guilty about the bad things he did in playing fast and truth, and loose with the truth, and with people's lives, and being a narcissist, but he should feel ashamed in the sense of trying to work on himself. Not that we're getting any leverage on him, but [inaudible] perfectly appropriate. Even in that case, much as I have very negative feelings towards that individual, I don't have to think that he's a horrible, horrendous human being. It might even be fun to play golf with him, if I'm here to play golf. But there's a lot of work he needs to do on himself. August: So, I think one of the things that's interesting is, this is not a book like a self-help book where you as an individual have issues with anger and shame and let's try to fix them. You're really talking about more of a macro thing, a collective thing, and serving as role models. Yeah, not just, in fact, the cultural self-help. Owen: Right. Well, you and I know, we were old enough to remember there were people like Martin Luther King Jr, and the Kennedys. These people with worth and all, Eugene McCarthy. I mean, there were all these people who really were worthy of role modeling. I just don't see that the younger generation has that. What they see in terms of, especially the display of these emotions, is emotions are just really - well, especially, just take the anger aside, basically you got to be a real quick reacting system, a person does and zap back every time you get zapped. I also think you could do this with other emotions too. There's a lot of cowardice. The only social media I'm on is Facebook, but I hear this. Well, I guess I'm on Twitter too, but I don't really know how to use that. But you notice a lot of cowardice in the following way. People say things about other people, things they would never say to their face. August: Of course. Yeah. Owen: I think that's atrocious, especially you could say to their face. Now, I dare you. That will restore that kind of knowing that if you have something really negative to say about another human being about what they did or said, say it to them. But from a cowardly pose of just... because people will say much nastier things, hurt the reputations of people through the third person form that they wouldn't say to a person's face. August: Right. Yeah, that's that ventilation, "I'm going to get it out of me. Right. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. I really loved reading this book. It pissed me off, and provoked me in different places, and other places, I really agreed with it, which is quite a reading. I should say, we didn't get to talk about your own, but you talked about your own personal experiences with shame. I really appreciate you writing the book. It taught me a lot, and it was a pleasure speaking with you. Owen: Thank you so much, August. You're a great interviewer, and it's a great opportunity to talk. I appreciate it. [END]

Alice Jardine

At the risk of thinking: An Intellectual biography of Julia Kristeva

At the Risk of Thinking is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world. Review theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/22/at-the-risk-of-thinking-by-alice-jardine-review-biography-of-a-feminist-intellectual About the Author Alice Jardine is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, USA. Her publications include The Future of Difference (1980), Gynésis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan (2007), and, as translator, Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon Roudiez, 1980). Mari Ruti (PhD, Harvard University) is Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of thirteen books: Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life (2006); A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living (2009); The Summons of Love (2011); The Case for Falling in Love (2011); The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (2012); The Call of Character (2013); Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2015); The Age of Scientific Sexism (Bloomsbury, 2015); Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman (Bloomsbury, 2016); The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects (2017); Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life (2018); Distillations: Theory, Ethics, Affect (Bloomsbury, 2018); and Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan: A Dialogue - with Amy Allen (Bloomsbury, 2019). Transcript August Baker: This is August Baker. Today I have the great privilege to be speaking with Professor Alice Jardine. Alice is a professor at Harvard University. She's worked in the forefront of critical thought since the '80s, wide ranging work. Prominent are issues of women, gender, and sexuality, and the analysis of politics, culture, and society. Today we're speaking with Professor Jardine about her recent book, which is the first biography of another public intellectual, specifically the inimitable Julia Kristeva. The book is called At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva. One of the endorsements for the book was by Noel McCaffey, and I thought it captured Alice's book very well. McCaffey said, "With a light and magical touch, Alice Jardine narrates the story of Julia Kristeva's journey from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, to the expanse of human singularity. In her intimate account Jardine shows how Kristeva became one of the most extraordinary intellectuals of our era. For every reader, here is a story that will inspire us all to think more deeply, to revolt against preconceptions, and to become our own force in creating the meaning of our lives." That's the end of the quote. I thought that was beautifully said and very true, was an inspiring book for me to read. The book has been very well-received, including winning 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Welcome, Alice. Alice Jardine: Hello, August. Thank you for inviting me. I'm thrilled to be here. August Baker: We are speaking on March 29th, 2022, and about a month ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. One of the things you say in your book is that the stories dominating Kristeva's earliest memories of her childhood were shaped by two devastating totalitarian invasions. Alice Jardine: Yes, indeed. So perhaps for your listeners, I'll clarify that the book is divided into three parts. The first part covers the years from Kristeva's birth in 1941 in Sliven, Bulgaria until 1965, and Kristeva's departure for Paris. The second part is her adventures in Paris, and the third part is a sort of overview of her life and work over the last few decades since the 1980s. That first part was absolutely the most challenging part to write, in part because of my own ignorance about Eastern Europe, and certainly about the history of Bulgaria, but also because I was writing it during the Trump administration and the echoes and reverberations and strange complexities of listening both to that historical moment of Kristeva's childhood in Bulgaria and what was happening in the United States. It also brought up a lot of Kristeva's concepts and vocabulary. She writes about radical evil. She writes about the death drive, et cetera, which maybe we'll have time to get to, which of course makes today, talking about this book with you and her childhood today, even more intense. What I meant by the statement about her memories and these invasions, of course, is referring to the fact that Bulgaria was neutral, tried to be neutral, before the Second World War, but entered as a member of the Axis powers. It came into the war with the Nazis, but also took a lot of distance from the Nazi regime, and for example, refused, or tried to refuse, to round up Jewish people and would not comply with various demands of the Nazi regime. Then by the summer of 1944, the Soviets were coming in through Romania, and Bulgaria got in trouble with the Soviets who then declared war on Bulgaria and invaded in September of '44. And Kristeva, of course, was a young child in Sliven, Bulgaria, and as she recalls those years, early years of her childhood, she evokes, for example, going down to the basement of her parents' home and listening to Radio London, and she gets quite excited when she talks about that. It's a very vivid memory in her mind because they had to be very quiet. Meanwhile, they were watching through the windows at the upper wall of the basement, and as she puts it, "First there were Nazi boots and then there were Soviet boots." The other things that she tends to talk about, which I try to talk about in the book, tends to be at the level of affect or emotion. She talks about fear, she talks about hearing rumors of horrible things and running through the streets to get home. She talks about a sense of regulation, always having what she needed, but not what she wanted. She tells stories about going to her friend's house and her friend's mother giving her friend one teaspoon of water at a time and no more. She talks about disappointment. She talks about especially her father's enormous disappointment that he's trying to raise his daughters in this place that he calls "the intestines of hell." And he- August Baker: He wanted to become a priest originally. Is that right? Alice Jardine: He did. He was a very devout orthodox Christian who had studied theology and wanted to continue in his efforts to be a theologian, and of course couldn't. Toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor and that was not a good idea. Because he wanted his daughters to be educated in Sofia, he became part of essentially the sort of Sovietized ministry of religion. But he wrote a lot, he wrote lot of essays sort of in secret and continued to believe for a very long time, even though they had to be very careful not to let the authorities see them sneaking off to communion early, at dawn. Yeah. August Baker: One of the things you say is, "All my childhood was bathed in this, the smell of the incense, the profusion of flowers on the altar." Beautiful. Alice Jardine: Yes, and she has talked quite a lot about the fact that Bulgaria itself is so full of contradiction and so full of... It's where Christianity and Islam and Judaism all met, and then there were the Turks and there were the Nazis and there were the Soviets. She really sees herself as having taken in history and sort of become a product of history. Then she always pauses and says, "But what really stuck was those memories of in the early morning, in the monastery or in the church with my father. It was the music, it was the art, it was the music, it was the smell of the flowers." Eventually those sensations, those affects I think, became for her a symbol, maybe not quite the right word, but certainly a avocation of that which escapes the kind of rationality of Soviet identity in that case. But even later for her, I think it evokes what she will later in her work call the semiotic, that which is not part of meaning and logic and rationality. She's always been more drawn, I think, to that sort of mystical magic than to logic and rationality. August Baker: I'm just kind of free associating here, but one of the things I was really interested... She resisted her father's religiosity for a long time, and one of the stories you tell in the book is about ultimately her representing atheism at that conference with the Pope. Could you tell our listeners about that? Alice Jardine: Yes. She had given a huge lecture, public lecture, in Italy on her book on Teresa. There were some representatives from the Vatican at that lecture, and they were very taken with her. She is very clear that she's an atheist. I mean, she may have these mystical memories, but she is a bonafide atheist. Slowly but surely, she began to receive invites to appear at this event in... I believe it was October of 2011. It was an event organized by Pope Benedict XVI, where a representative from the majority of the world's religions were going to gather in order to discuss the future of the church, and for the first time in history, they invited an atheist. So I include in the book this photograph that I still find quite astonishing. All of these men lined up in a row, in every possible outfit- August Baker: Yes. Costume or religious outfit. Yeah. Alice Jardine: Yes, and Kristeva at the very end standing there very modestly, and she spoke last, actually. They all spoke, and she spoke last. Pope Benedict actually was very moved by what she had to say, and he afterwards made the remarks, looking at all of these representatives, he said, "You know, no one owns the truth." August Baker: Right. Outstanding. That was quite a story. If we go back to her early childhood, it's interesting. She says there were two stories she wanted the readers to know, and at one point you address the reader and say, "There are also two stories about Kristeva's childhood that I want you to know." I guess that's four stories total. Could you give us one or two of those stories, whichever appeals to you at the moment? Alice Jardine: Of course. Well, I'll be self-involved and tell you what I think your listeners might want to know if they've read any Kristeva or know of her and her work. Because I didn't know these stories until like 2011 or '12, and it made so much sense to me. Briefly, one of them was that she hated when she was a young girl, she hated girl stuff. She was given a doll house and she loathed it. She wanted to destroy it. She hated the little dolls in the doll house. She would evidently just stomp around screaming that she didn't want to do all of that. She didn't want to wash the dishes and dress the dolls, et cetera, and that said a lot. She talks about her books and those were the precious items locked away in the cupboard. The other story she told me also made a lot of sense to me. It was new to me when she told me that she almost never cried as a child, almost never. And she would do things like, and she was very famous for it when she was quite young, she and her mother would be walking in the park and Kristeva would just take off running and she would run and run and run as fast as she could until she'd fall down, and she'd stand up and she'd have scratches and blood and it would be a mess. Her mother would come running, "What have you done?" And she would say, Kristeva would say, she'd touch her mother's face very gently and say, "Oh mama, don't worry. I'll take care of you." And that's the story [inaudible 00:13:27]. August Baker: That was such a great story. Yeah. Alice Jardine: That said a lot. August Baker: It certainly did. I love that. She started out as a journalist, and it's difficult for us to imagine what it must have been like to be a... I mean, for her high school newspaper. It's difficult for us to imagine what it would've been like to be a journalist in a communist country. She wrote some things that put her family at some risk, even when she was... I guess when she was 21. Alice Jardine: There are a couple of things to say about that period that, again, I don't think very many anglophone readers know a lot about. When she began writing as a journalist, quite young, in her teens, actually mainly for money, for extra money, and eventually became quite well-known because of her ability to write in a very palimpsestic or kind of camouflaged kind of way. She seemed to have the ability to write a sort of surface level story that would adhere to what the authorities and censors wanted. But she could wind through it the stories that she actually wanted to tell, and she was very good at it. Just before she left Paris, actually, well, 1962, she was 21 years old, and there was a dissident journalist named Albert Cohen who had written a book and no one- August Baker: Roads and Stops. Alice Jardine: Roads and Stops, and no one wanted to review it because it was very much written in... It was the Khrushchev era. It was very much written in the spirit of the thaw as they called it, in other words, a kind of renewed openness to the Western world and a lot of literary exploration. No one wanted to review it, except of course our young Kristeva who perhaps naively wrote this absolutely sparkling review of the book. The next day on the front page of the communist newspaper, there was a headline that said, "Julia Kristeva, cosmopolitan agent of the capitalist hyena." She was called a spy. She was called a Zionist, which was of course an insult, and they were terrified. Her father, who was probably the most aware of the dangers of this kind of thing, took her to a monastery and they sort of hid out because he was afraid they were going to be sent away to a camp. Then to make everything worse, Radio Free Europe did a whole session on how brilliant she was. Nothing happened to them, and I suggest that this may have been because she was not particularly political in the public sphere except for this camouflaged writing, and she was becoming quite well-known as a translator. For example, she took the cosmonauts around. Yeah, so this time period when she was writing is really, really important to understand, I think. She even wrote a book that nobody knows about, which I'm trying to get translated. 1964, she published a book called Characteristic Trends in 20th Century Western Literature. The more I looked at this time period when she was with all of these dissident journalists and dissident intellectuals, including her sweetheart, Tzvetan Stoyanov, that's really when she began to become Julia Kristeva, in an odd kind of way. I mean, this writing, which Stoyanov actually called a theoretical hurricane. He said, "Julia, you write these theoretical hurricanes." What she was trying to do was camouflage what she was actually writing, which was already a kind of window on the Western world, and in some ways, almost a preview of some of her earliest works in French, which many readers in French, in English and many other languages find very, very hard to read. Very hard, and I think it's from that time. August Baker: She eventually gets out of Bulgaria and goes to France, which easily could not have happened. It's kind of a miracle that did happen. December 15th, 1965, she gets on a plane to Paris with $5.00. It's easy to romanticize that, but I think what I found from your book was that it was extremely difficult to leave her home and her family and go and learn to think in a new language. It wasn't this heady, intellectual time when she first got to Paris. Alice Jardine: No, that's right. This was another discovery for me because I think I had sort of bought into that myth of, "Oh, Kristeva, she went off to Paris and became immediately part of the scene there." Well, no, not exactly. She desperately missed her intellectual community in Sofia. In fact, in the book I explained that I think part of her ability to find Roland Barthes and all of these other extraordinary intellectuals of the time was her effort to recreate that sense of being the center of the world and being able to really think out loud with like-minded friends. But as she was looking for these friends, she was quite depressed. She missed her community, she missed her boyfriend, Tzvetan. She missed her parents dreadfully. As you said, she was trying to learn to write in French and felt like her Bulgarian self was dying. She couldn't quite figure out how to do that. It took quite a long time. But eventually, because of this sort of parade of amazing mentors, she was able to find a community in Paris and eventually find her way and publish, and the rest is literature. She just never stopped., and met her husband to be and got married in 1967. She did manage to do it, but it wasn't easy. It was hard. A couple of times she got very sick. In fact, it was one of the reasons she and Philippe Sollers got married was she was really, really sick and had been working so hard. Don't forget, she thought she had to go back to Bulgaria. She thought she was only there for a year, and so she was just trying to... She was like a sponge. She was just going to everything and doing everything. She got really sick. Because she was from a communist country, they wouldn't give her a hospital room, and lots of stories about that. Then eventually she and Sollers got married and she was able to get the medical care she needed and become more integrated into French culture, which she did, more or less. August Baker: One of the funny things you said in the book, "It is actually hard for me to think of Julia Kristeva as anyone's wife, especially Sollers." Alice Jardine: [inaudible 00:21:12] that one. My editors didn't catch that. Yeah, I talk a lot in the book. I mean, I write quite extensively about that relationship, which I've come to accept, and I've come to understand better than I used to. He is such a character and he is such a brilliant writer, but- August Baker: I don't think that our listeners probably know about Dominique Rolin [inaudible 00:21:40]- Alice Jardine: No, they probably don't. Yeah, so the short version is that when Kristeva met her future husband, Philippe Sollers, he was already very involved with a Belgian writer, a very well-known Belgian writer, named Dominique Rolin, and who was much older than Sollers. I forget, I think she was 45. He was 20-something. Anyway, long story short, he, Sollers, made it very clear to Kristeva that this was a lifetime relationship. In fact, it was. She passed away, Dominique Rolin passed away, I think it was 2012, off the top of my head, and they were quite loyal to each other. And Kristeva never, ever experienced any jealousy in her telling. And of course, the reason she gives is that her father loved her so much, so much, that it didn't bother her. Rolin was very good for Sollers' writing, which was the most important thing to him. "And so why not? Why be jealous?" she said to me. August Baker: Right. You say, quoting her, "I was never jealous of my mother, convinced as I was that my father preferred me to her and to everyone else for that matter. It's my symptom to believe it, certainly, unless it's my strength." Alice Jardine: Yeah, that relationship between Kristeva and her father, I'm sure there's much more to write about. It was absolutely determinant. Yes. August Baker: He told her to "stand upright." Alice Jardine: Yes. August Baker: "Stand up straight, and even kneel with a very straight back in a corner." Alice Jardine: Yes. She was supposed to be the older sister. She has the younger sister, very talented musician. Kristeva was supposed to be the... She was supposed to be grownup and she was supposed to control her temper and behave. I keep saying that's why she has so much spine, she's so determined and so strong. I think that early relationship with her father was part of that. Her mother too, though. We didn't say very much about her mother, who was a very brilliant scientist, mathematician, with a creative side. She was also an illustrator. But she was really the exact opposite of Kristeva' father, the sort of rational mathematician who helped Kristeva with her schoolwork. [inaudible 00:24:39]. August Baker: Right, right, right. So she becomes a journalist, essayist, academic, a professor, public intellectual. Then at a certain point, she decides to go into psychoanalysis and eventually become a psychoanalyst. You say at one point, "To read, to listen, to think was not enough. She needed to feel implicated." Alice Jardine: Yeah. August Baker: Can you tell us about the decision to go into psychoanalysis and also maybe something about her analyst? Alice Jardine: Yes. I think that that desire to be implicated, to remain implicated is, I would almost say, characterological of Kristeva. It reminds me of when I was a young student in New York and she was writing an essay on the avant garde, the American avant garde, and she pulled me in her office and said, "Okay, we have to go and see five avant garde productions of some kind in New York." I was like 22, I don't know, I was like, "Okay." Because she wanted to experience it firsthand. I would say that because she had been to Lacan's seminars in Paris, and because she was beginning to circulate in the Tel Quel Group, and not only with Sollers, her husband, but with other members of Tel Quel, many of whom were deeply involved with psychoanalytic theory. Because of her passion for language and her belief that we are all not just implicated, but actually constructed by language, she wanted to go on the couch. She wanted to speak her implication in all of these ideas that she was writing about academically, theoretically. She asked a few friends, it's a long story, but eventually she was sort of moved towards Ilse Barant, a German analyst who has a long and an interesting story herself, as a Jewish woman, with a very sad, long story in occupied France. But Kristeva, who at that point was deeply immersed in Melanie Klein and Winnicott and others, discovered in Barant an intelligence that both reassured her about her sense of language, the magic of language, and the existential importance of artistic and literary consciousness. So she found someone who shared her, I guess, for lack of a better word, I'll say epistemology, but shared what she cared about, but also someone who challenged her at every turn and who did not... I think I tell the story about going and interviewing and seeing if it was a right fit, and Kristeva talking about how her relationship with her mother was like a ball bouncing on the floor that she just touched her mother, but never actually got to- August Baker: Stayed a bit, never stayed a bit. Alice Jardine: Yeah, and balance it. "Okay, you start now." It was clear. Yeah, I mean, for me, what was fascinating about that story, to go into analysis, but she had no idea she would become an analyst when she started. But the analysis led her to three things that where anglophone readers are essential. It led her to feminism because she decided that she needed to go to China because she needed to feel implicated if she was going to write about ideograms, et cetera. So she was going to go to China, which is a whole story I tell, which there were some funny bits. She is going to go to China, and then she's going to write a book on Chinese women for this notorious publishing firm, des Femmes. Through that essay and through that book, and through that experience, she became a feminist in the eyes of American readers, she decided that she would become an analyst. This was quite far along in the process. She's, "I think this is for me." Third, she decided to become a mother. Those were the three huge, huge decisions that had reverberating consequences that came out of that decision. August Baker: You mentioned becoming a mother. Tell us about, our readers, another thing that I didn't know about her son. Is it David or- Alice Jardine: David. August Baker: Yes, David. Alice Jardine: David is a miracle. David is extraordinary, an extraordinary human being for whom I have enormous affection. I tell the story of Kristeva's pregnancy, which was quite unexceptional, and then David was born and adored. Then they began to see that something wasn't quite right. It turned out, long story short, that David had what they call an orphan disease, but a neurological disorder that led to a series of physical disabilities. But David never lost an ounce or even less, whatever, less than an ounce is, of his intelligence and memory. He has a photographic memory, and is very witty and smart. And [inaudible 00:30:37]- August Baker: You can imagine that what Stoyan gave to Kristeva, she passed on to David. Alice Jardine: Yeah. Yeah. David is very special. He's now an adult man who writes and who thinks and who plays, and he's a remarkable human being. But I think for Kristeva, as soon as she realized that she had a disabled child, she had to find a way to continue as an analyst, continue as a writer, continue as a professor, continue as a wife, continue as a world traveler, and continue as the mother of a disabled son, which- August Baker: Which is inspiring, yeah. Alice Jardine: ... she has done brilliantly. August Baker: Yes. But one point, I think you refer to the marches that she would listen to in Bulgaria, kind of march on- Alice Jardine: Yes. That was a discovery. She has gone back to Bulgaria a couple of times to make films. I was of course watching all of these films. In one of them, I'd have to look up the title of it, but it shows her, she joined during the alphabet ceremony that she had participated in as a child, which basically is a celebration of the monks who invented the Slavic alphabet. Once a year, children all over Bulgaria put on a letter that they parade around in. It's a celebration of the alphabet. Anyway- August Baker: In no other country is there a celebration of the alphabet, that I know of. That's interesting. Fascinating. Alice Jardine: I've learned that there are kind mini-celebrations in other parts of Eastern Europe, but I haven't able to track down exactly where. Anyway, one of these films showed her at one of these alphabet celebrations in May, and she began marching with the crowd. It was just extraordinary to suddenly see this very elegant Parisian woman suddenly marching with such vehemence and singing this Sovietized marching song about writing. It's about writing. It was extraordinary. All of these parts of her, she's quite a puzzle. August Baker: Yeah. You said that it was on the couch... I'm sorry, feels like I'm rushing. There's so much to cover. You said that on the couch that Kristeva found many of her best ideas, and you refer to Julia's conceptual toolbox. That's a big topic, but could you just give an overview of that? Alice Jardine: Well, yeah, I can say a few short things about that. The most famous example of that is when she was in analysis with Ilse Barant. She was saying, "Oh, my mother's here. Oh my God. And there's the baby, and I'm writing this book on saline, and it's so abject." Ilse Barant said, "Oh, that's the word you want." And the notion of objection became one of Kristeva's most famous concepts. What I call in my courses, especially with my grad students, what I call her conceptual toolbox, I guess I could summarize very quickly as first of all, having to do with the question of the intellectual, and certainly today in 2022, how can you be an intellectual? She talks about being contestatory. She talks about putting reliance and care at the center of one's practice as opposed to aggression and one-upmanship, et cetera. Secondly, I would say there's a batch of concepts that have to do with going back to concepts that have been very important historically in Western philosophy, and not throwing the baby out with the bath water, as it were. She wants to reinvent humanism. She wants to rethink universalism. She wants to get away from talking about identity and focus on subjectivity very much in the psychoanalytic sense. Then thirdly, and lastly, I think she really wants intellectuals to think about vulnerable subjects, all of the kinds of human subjects who are vulnerable and not- August Baker: And marginalized. Alice Jardine: ... and marginalized. Exactly. Especially because she believes that one of the things that the Western world is suffering from right now, and not only the Western world, but maybe especially, is what she calls an ideality disorder, just meaning briefly that because of the assault of technology on our psyches, we've lost our capacity for psychic space, and we are losing our idealism. We're becoming disappointed and distressed about our ideals that we had believed in, and now we're not so sure. She really sees that as a serious crisis that needs addressing. August Baker: Right. Yeah. One of the things I really liked about your book is that you go through her... I don't know which section it is, but you go through... There's so many ideas which one associates with Kristeva, and what I found really helpful was that if you want to see her thoughts on the death drive, here's the book, when she talked about being a mother of a child with a disability, here's where you look. If you want to look at the need to believe in the desire to know, here's the book. It's kind of like a large annotated bibliography, if you will. Alice Jardine: Well, thank you for saying that, because that was one of my intentions was- August Baker: Because otherwise you don't know what to buy. There's so much, and this way you can zero in on what you want to see. Alice Jardine: Yeah. I say in the introduction that the Kristeva's relationship to this biography, it's the first one, there'll be many more. I had to be very careful. She doesn't want her private life aired until after her demise. Then I said my relationship to the book is really about not praising her or putting her on a pedestal, but really trying to honestly recount her life as I believe she's lived it. Then my readers' relationship, I wrote it for interested non-specialist readers, and so what better thing could I do than point towards various kinds of readings? Because there's so much. There's so much. August Baker: There's so much. Alice Jardine: I think at one point, I'm trying to mention 50 books, something about 50 books that isn't just a throwaway line or something terribly superficial, to actually say something meaningful that will make my reader want to go read that book. August Baker: Oh, absolutely. You succeed brilliantly at that. Alice Jardine: Thank you. August Baker: Oh boy, we're running out of time. Can you tell us, what is this Sabina? Alice Jardine: Woo. How long do we have? August Baker: In 30 seconds. No. Alice Jardine: No! August Baker: No, go. I'm just kidding. Tell us, what is this? Alice Jardine: Okay. The short version is that in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, various kinds of archives were set up that were attempting to identify folks who had been working secretly with the communist regimes and were agents or spies, if you like. Those archives in Bulgaria were declassified in 2007 and lo and behold, slowly it became apparent that Kristeva was named in those archives and that she had been an agent of the DEAS, of the horrible secret service. There's a lot to say about this. But in 2018, I remember, March 28th, 2018, I got a phone call that it was public that she had been named. Of course, she was aghast. She was horrified and has denied it totally. When The New York Times called me and asked me what I thought, I said, almost without thinking, "I believe her. I believe her completely." And I go through all the reasons why, but I said, "The most important reason is that if she had been forced in order to protect her own life or the life of her family to do that, she would've written about it when the wall came down. She couldn't have helped herself." The thing that's so sad, and I'll just say this quickly, I know we're running out of time, but the thing that's so sad about this whole affair really, ultimately, is that I mentioned her sweetheart, Tzvetan Stoyanov, back in Bulgaria. In early 1971, he accepted a challenge to go and try to convince Georgi Markov, who's probably one of the most famous poisoned dissidents in history with- August Baker: With the umbrella- Alice Jardine: With the umbrella tip, right, to convince Markov to come back to Bulgaria, and he failed. He did not. Her sweetheart did not convince Markov to come back to Sofia. In mid-June of 1971, when Tzvetan Stoyanov and Julia Kristeva were the two most famous intellectuals in Bulgaria, Stoyanov died. He died under very strange circumstances. One has to be very careful because there's no proof, but I believe that he was killed by the DEAS. In the archive that names Kristeva as a spy, they give mid-June 1971 as the date of her engagement as a spy. What's sad, really sad, is from that moment on, from mid-June 1971, they surveilled her, and her husband, and her child, and her family. We still don't quite know what they did, what they threatened her parents with back in Bulgaria, and she had no idea. No idea. It's called blind surveillance. I mean, it was a technical kind of surveillance. It really devastated her, and it really devastated her that the Western press jumped on it and didn't question all of this fake news, all of this dissembling, all of this politicking from a period that very few Anglophones understand. So- August Baker: In her self defense, when she is asked? Alice Jardine: She didn't know. She didn't know, and when they bring up like, "Well, you had tea with Mr. Kostov." August Baker: "Yes, I did." Alice Jardine: Yeah. "Yeah, he had sent me books from France when I was a student in Bulgaria. I had no idea he was a spy." Of course, he left Bulgaria in 1977. He wanted no more of it. But in any case, she has answers. "Well, what about the time you said, 'Power to the people, ironically?'" And she said, "Well, this poet, or this wannabe poet, came to my apartment door." She can talk about each incident that's brought up. But overall, it's her disappointment and worry and anger that the press can be so gullible about these... and it's happened to a lot of people. To a lot of people. August Baker: Right. Unfortunately, we're past our time, Alice. I really appreciate... There's so much more. I think that the death of her father. She's had a lot of deaths and a lot of resurrections in her life, as she says. It's a fascinating story and it makes one want to read her books and one knows where to look. Thank you so much for speaking with me. Alice Jardine: Thank you, August. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Mark Epstein M.D. (private practice, NYC)

The zen of therapy: Uncovering a hidden kindness in life

"A warm, profound and cleareyed memoir. . . this wise and sympathetic book's lingering effect is as a reminder that a deeper and more companionable way of life lurks behind our self-serious stories."—Oliver Burkeman, New York Times Book Review

A remarkable exploration of the therapeutic relationship, Dr. Mark Epstein reflects on one year's worth of therapy sessions with his patients to observe how his training in Western psychotherapy and his equally long investigation into Buddhism, in tandem, led to greater awareness—for his patients, and for himself

For years, Dr. Mark Epstein kept his beliefs as a Buddhist separate from his work as a psychiatrist. Content to use his training in mindfulness as a private resource, he trusted that the Buddhist influence could, and should, remain invisible. But as he became more forthcoming with his patients about his personal spiritual leanings, he was surprised to learn how many were eager to learn more. The divisions between the psychological, emotional, and the spiritual, he soon realized, were not as distinct as one might think. In The Zen of Therapy, Dr. Epstein reflects on a year's worth of selected sessions with his patients and observes how, in the incidental details of a given hour, his Buddhist background influences the way he works. Meditation and psychotherapy each encourage a willingness to face life's difficulties with courage that can be hard to otherwise muster, and in this cross-section of life in his office, he emphasizes how therapy, an element of Western medicine, can in fact be considered a two-person meditation. Mindfulness, too, much like a good therapist, can "hold" our awareness for us—and allow us to come to our senses and find inner peace. Throughout this deeply personal inquiry, one which weaves together the wisdom of two worlds, Dr. Epstein illuminates the therapy relationship as spiritual friendship, and reveals how a therapist can help patients cultivate the sense that there is something magical, something wonderful, and something to trust running through our lives, no matter how fraught they have been or might become. For when we realize how readily we have misinterpreted our selves, when we stop clinging to our falsely conceived constructs, when we touch the ground of being, we come home. TRANSCRIPT Transcription: August Baker: This is August Baker, and today I'm happy to be able to speak with Dr. Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and private practice in New York City. And the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy. Seems to be one of the pioneers of using Buddhism in medicine in the United States. He worked with all the usual suspects that you learn about as an American looking into this issue; Herbert Benson, Ron Doss, Robert Thurman, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, not to mention the current Dalai Lama, who Dr. Epstein met very early on, and who actually also wrote the introduction to Mark's first book. Today, I'm pleased to talk to Dr. Epstein about his newest book, The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness. Welcome, Mark. Dr. Epstein: Thank you so much. August Baker: I will say to our listeners that I actually listened to this book. If you're listening to this podcast, you used to listening, and I listened to this book. Dr. Epstein: You listened to the book? August Baker: I did. Dr. Epstein: You heard me reading it? August Baker: Yes. It was it a very good way of doing it. In fact, I listened to it twice. And it's a very enjoyable read. As you point out, it is always interesting, there are a lot of case examples, you're talking about actual patients and what's going on, and those are always interesting, as you point out. But it works well in the car. Dr. Epstein: That's good. August Baker: So to give you an open-ended prompt to start, it seems like for this book you decided to take a look at your own process and see how Buddhism has... You developed a style, and now you want to step back and say, "How did Buddhism affect my style?" Dr. Epstein: Yeah. Well, I developed a style as a therapist. I also developed a style as a writer. So if I can talk for a little bit, I can sort of flesh that out, what you're bringing up right from the beginning. When I first started writing, I didn't really think of myself as a writer. I knew I was a therapist, but then, I felt sort of compelled to be a translator in a certain way, of Buddhist psychological thought into western psychodynamic, psychoanalytic language, which is the language of the mind, that we speak in this country. So I set about at the beginning, trying to make sense of the concepts like ego and egolessness and emptiness, and what do we mean by that on the Buddhist side, what do we mean by that on the psychotherapy side. But when I continued writing, I found that what enlivened the writing was if I could talk from a personal place about my own experience. And the first book I wrote, you mentioned it already, the one the Dalai Lama wrote the introduction for, was called Thoughts Without a Thinker. And the third part of Thoughts Without a Thinker, I started writing a little bit from a personal perspective, more around being a meditator than being a therapist. But I thought to myself that if this meditation thing really has affected me in any way, I should be able to describe it in some kind of personal terms. So I sort of set that as my task, and I think it helped the books. It made them more personal and less just exclusively from the mind and about the concepts. So I kept that up through a series of books until this last one. But what I had resisted in my own writing was more writing from inside the place of the therapist. I wrote about being on retreats, on Buddhist retreats, and trying to be mindful, and wishing for a piece of toast on my retreat, and then taking the first bite of the toast, and then the toast disappeared, and who ate my toast.I had fun with that kind of writing. The question that people are always asking me is, "How do you bring your Buddhist leanings into the actual psychotherapy practice?" And I always resisted giving a good answer to that question because I didn't really know how I was doing it. I just trusted that if it was happening in me, it should be coming through in some way. But- August Baker: Isn't that kind of a Buddhist way of looking at it? Dr. Epstein: It might be kind of a Buddhist... At its best, it's a Buddhist way of looking at it. At its worst, it's a defensive maneuver to not answer the question. I think I really didn't know. I think I really was trusting that it must be coming through somehow. But I had run out of things to write about, but I had one day set aside for writing, and I didn't quite know what to do with it. So I decided, "Okay, why don't I look at my own work? Because mostly what I'm doing is therapy with people." So I decided to pick out one session a week where something interesting happened. Maybe I was bringing some Buddhist something or maybe there was just some kind of clearing or opening. Not exactly a revelation, because I don't think therapy works that way, but some little movement. And I forced myself to write down the session, which I don't normally do. In the aftermath, when the patient left, I would scribble down notes. And then in my writing day I would try to write it up in a sort of literary fashion. And I did that for a year. So I had a stack of these sessions, different patients. The only real through line was myself. And then, I showed the stack to my editor, who I trust. And she said, "Oh, this could be a book. I think there's something here. But you are the only through line. So I think what you should do is go through them and write a reflection, or a commentary. Show us more of yourself from behind the curtain of being the anonymous therapist. So then, COVID happened, because I did all this before COVID, it was the last year of face-to-face therapy, it turned out to be. So the first year of COVID, I spent going through the sessions and really working with them and writing about what might have been going on inside of me during the time and so on. And I enjoyed that process. It brought out a kind of personal voice that was challenging, but enjoyable. And so, that's the nucleus of the book. August Baker: Yeah, that's true. It was all great, but you talk about being personal, the description of being in Maine with your family was just really moving. And I also thought that the description of your speech therapist when you were a kid just captured so much and it was very vulnerable and very well taken. Dr. Epstein: I'm glad you listened to the audio book, because I have a funny story about recording... It wasn't this book, but I wrote a book called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, which was the second book that I ever wrote. And that book, I did the audio version of, and it was the first time I ever did the audio version. The reason I needed a speech therapist when I was young was because I had a stutter or a stammer, which I managed to learn how to deal with. And now, no one could know that the tendency is still there. But when I was shut up into the recording studio, which is like a telephone booth when you're doing these audio books, I had to begin with the actual words, obviously, in Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart. The trick that my therapist had taught me was that if I felt myself about to stutter, I could change the word a little bit. So when someone asked me my name, if I had trouble saying Mark, I would say, "My name is Mark." And somehow, changing it at the last minute let the words come out. So when I was recording this book, the very first words were a word that I knew I was going to stutter on, but I couldn't change the first words of the book. So I was sitting... There was this long silence where I'm in the recording studio. August Baker: That's great. Dr. Epstein: The voice of the engineer comes through my headphones and he's like, "Dr. Epstein, is everything all right in there?" And I thought, "Oh, here I am, the avatar of meditation and relaxation and stress reduction, and I can't even get the words out my mouth." So I was sort of frightened to go in and record this book, but it came out okay, I think. August Baker: No, it came out great. It was very nicely done. I tend to want to talk about the abstract, philosophical stuff, but I wanted to start... You say early on that you characterize yourself as spiritual but not religious, and there's a funny description of a conversation with your mom about that, which is really classic. And then, I felt that the way that came through for me as I thought about the book after having read it, was this sort of playfulness. I'm trying to think of the right word, serendipity and openness. A patient brings in experiences with Reiki massage, or body [inaudible 00:10:03], or energy blocks, or Ayahuasca, and you're conversant in that and happy to talk about it. And there were two occasions that I thought were just so interesting. You talked with patients about their dreams. And one with the patient Zach, and you used something called the I Ching and- Dr. Epstein: The I Ching. August Baker: The I Ching. And the other patient, Ricki says, "I don't know, I'm wishing for a miracle." Could you tell our listeners about those two cases? Dr. Epstein: Sure. I'll start with the second one. Ricki was a woman who was grieving, and she had lost her soulmate. And she was genuinely grieving, except I felt like there was some bit of pretense in her grieving. It just didn't feel completely true to me, like she was exaggerating the grief. But at the same time, I couldn't really feel it. So that's an uncomfortable feeling for me as a therapist. And I didn't quite know what to do. I wanted to help her, but I was a little bit put off be. So I'm just in my head and trying to be with her. And then, suddenly she came out with this, "I'm in so much pain and I just need a..." Yearning for a miracle. And I was like, "Oh, a miracle. You want a miracle?" And another patient of mine who was a follower of a now deceased guru in India, who had been Ram Das' guru, but people still go back to the ashram where he had been, she had brought me back some, they call it Prasad, some food that had been blessed by the guru or by the guru's disciple. They're like sugary sweets basically, that sit on the altar and are blessed. And then, they're given back to the devotees, and they have a bit of the guru, a bit of the God energy in it. And she brought me back some from India. It's like when people bring you a little bottle of water from the Ganges or something. And I have a ceramic vase that... My wife is a sculptor known for her innovative use of ceramics, but I have a vase that she made early, early on, when she was probably 20 years old, that has all these pennies in it, that I stole from her and I keep in my office. And I put the Prasad that my patient had brought back from India in that vase. So it's there on a shelf in my office. So Ricki's like, "Oh, I need a miracle. Why won't someone give me a miracle?" "So I'll give you a miracle." So I went to the vase and I took out the Prasad. It was in a little plastic envelope. And I came back and stood by her side, and I took out these couple of sugar pills that had been blessed by the guru. And I said, "Here, hold out your hand." She's like, am I giving her LSD or something, or an antidepressant. But I said, "No." I explained what I just explained. And she took it gingerly and put it on her tongue and swallowed it. And it changed the energy in the room. So there was this moment of real contact, where I think I just totally surprised her. So it shook her out of whatever her... It was like her ego was doing the grief, but something was stopping it from coming from deeper. But anyway, we had this moment around the miracle, around the Prasad. And then the session went on, and it was better. But then she left. And later that night or the next day, she sent me an email that I quoted in the book. Basically saying, "Your placebo or whatever it was, you should give that to all of your patients." And she misspelled patients as being patient. But anyway, it cleared something. And it was just made this nice moment between us. So that's not something I usually do, but the playfulness that I think you were referring to, part of my job, I always think as a therapist, is to try to make the session interesting for people, in a way that possibly does shake them out of a fixed narrative that they're telling themselves about who they are or what their problem is or what needs to happen. So if I can get into that in a way that- August Baker: Sticks. Dr. Epstein: ... breaks that up. Yeah, then I feel like I'm doing my job. So that was the story with her. With Zach, he was telling me a dream that was very sexual in nature, that maybe I won't describe all of the details on the podcast. But anyway, one part of his dream was the sort of mechanical sexual situation, as if he was in a porn film or something. That it wasn't him, it was another couple in the corner who were having sex, I think the way he thought you were supposed to have sex, or something. And then, he was being introduced to a beautiful woman who he felt like he had to go down on. But he went down on her, but there was so much pubic hair in the way that he couldn't find her genitalia. And so, he was frustrated with her, with himself, woke up from the dream. And so, he was asking for help with the dream. I had some ideas, but what occurred to me was, "Maybe we should ask the I Ching about the dream. Have you ever thrown the I Ching?" He didn't know what the I Ching was, but I Ching is- August Baker: He had a little- Dr. Epstein: He had a little knowledge. He did Tai Chi. I thought he would know more what it was than he did. Anyway, I have an old copy of the I Ching in my office, and I took it down and I showed him how to throw the... You throw three pennies six times, and it gives you a hexagram, and the hexagram gives you an oracle that tells you in kind of coded language the answer to whatever question you're asking. So we threw it together, and the oracle, the hexagram that comes up has a title, and the one that came up was called Biting Through. So it was exactly what this dream was. It was about biting through the obstacles that keep you from your true self. And so, I made a thing with him, that the performative aspect of sex was getting in the way of the being aspect. The doing versus the being seemed to be what the I Ching was talking about. And that maybe he was in search of the female element, as represented by the female genitalia that he couldn't quite find. And we had a beautiful session. August Baker: The other thing that comes through is your use of poetry. And also, I don't know if you play music in your sessions, but you talk a lot about John Cage. And that was one of the cases where John Cage had used that as a way to put in this, scientists would say randomness, but serendipity or playfulness into a composition. Dr. Epstein: Yes. Well, to take his ego out of it, that was what he would say. To take his choice out of the composition, so that his music could become reflective of the ways of nature. The I Ching was supposed to be a way of connecting to the natural world and the natural intelligence. So Cage, I don't know if everyone who is listening to this knows about John Cage, but Cage was a very important figure, not just for me, but for the whole history of contemporary art. Friends of Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham, and really affected the course of modern art by challenging the centrality of the ego by undercutting the artist's ego as the defining factor in the work. But Cage was a beautiful man, who his own humor and his own sensitivity managed to sneak through his own process. So I really respect that about him. August Baker: And I was struck by, you mentioned his famous piece of Four Minutes, and however many seconds. Dr. Epstein: Thirty-Three Seconds. August Baker: Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds. You could tell our listeners about that. But I also wanted to ask you, I don't recall you addressing this exactly in the book, but I wanted to see what your thoughts were on silence in the psychotherapy session and how that might relate. Dr. Epstein: Oh, it totally relates. Cage's famous piece, it's four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. But he performed it in an outdoor amphitheater in Woodstock, New York, an arts and crafts outdoor theater. So the performance was the pianist sitting down at the piano, opening the keyboard was the first movement, closing the keyboard back up was the second movement. And then, the crowd coughing and rustling and getting up and leaving and being uncomfortable was the third movement. And all throughout, it wasn't silent, it was the sounds of the Hudson Valley, the sounds of nature, the wind, and the birds, and the animals scurrying through, and the people. August Baker: And the people trying to make sense of it. Dr. Epstein: The people trying to make sense of it. The people's minds trying to make sense of it, which Cage was deliberately engaging with. So Cage's big, his big book that he wrote is called Silence. And his big revelation is that there's no such thing as silence, that there's always... He even went into these echoic chambers at Harvard, where it's completely silent. But even in the chamber, he was hearing his own blood rushing in his body, and his own heartbeat, his own nervous system. So his revelation was that silence doesn't exist, that there's always... So as a therapist, one of the things that I've had to train myself to do, that meditation helped me with, is not to jump in right away when a patient first comes into the room, when it's awkward, and when there's anxiety, because starting... When I was a patient in therapy, I always wished for a dream. So if I had a dream the night before, then I knew I could just start with the dream, and then I was off the hook. So as a therapist, to be able to wait for what's behind the presenting words. People often make up something to start the session with, or else they sit uncomfortably. But the trick with therapy is to be open to whatever arises naturally, and to really trust that what comes, even if it seems ordinary, or benign, or not that interesting- August Baker: Or nothing. Dr. Epstein: Or nothing, that there's always something. So to be able to go with that, unless a person is really too anxious and then needs my support, then I'll jump in. But that being able to wait that extra beat as a therapist potentially allows something unexpected to emerge. And that's always what's interesting in the therapy.And I tried to show that in the book by just showing how ordinary most of therapy is. We're not really talking about the deep childhood traumas that often. We're more talking about the mother-in-law visiting, or the fight with the wife, or difficulty with the stepchildren- August Baker: Bringing home the avocado toast and the soup, and getting the sizes wrong. Dr. Epstein: That's my favorite story. August Baker: I love that. That was the man who looks very much like the young Antonio Banderas, I believe. Dr. Epstein: Exactly. August Baker: By the way, I thought that one of the very interesting things about your book, I haven't seen this before, is that in most books about psychotherapy, where you see case studies, you don't... They're a composite or they're really just the author. Like, [inaudible 00:23:07] did that, and just two cases of Mr. Z, it's just him. And these, I thought it was very interesting, each one, you had the patients read over and comment on and say, "Yeah, I agree with this. And by the way, I remember that session and this happened." But they've all been approved by our- Dr. Epstein: Oh, yes. August Baker: Is that something you've done before? I thought that was- Dr. Epstein: Well, anytime I've used anything from a real patient, I always ask them, "Will you read this over? And is this okay? And should I change anything?" I've always done that. But I've always been very reluctant to mine the sessions because I didn't like having my mind in a separate place, "Oh, I could use this." So that's when I started using myself as a patient. In a lot of my earlier books, I write about my speech therapy and my first therapist, my second therapist, my troubles with my wife. I decided to use myself as the main patient. But here- August Baker: As did Freud. Dr. Epstein: As did Freud, yes. I had a good mentor and a good example in Freud. But here, where I was using the real patients, with everyone, I went back and forth, "Do you remember it this way? Is it okay to say this?" The main thing that people wanted to discuss was what the pseudonym was, because they were like, "Why did you call me this? That's my middle name. I hate that name." One patient thought the name I picked was too fem and wanted a more gender neutral name, et cetera. So I'm fine with all of that. But the back and forth was fun. And I tried to include a little bit of that in the narrative of the book. August Baker: You did. That was nice. Dr. Epstein: And the one you're referring to, my patient who bears a remarkable resemblance to Antonio Banderas, in my back and forth with him, as a sort of joke at the end of our correspondence about the actual session, he said, "And if you would just say that I bear an uncanny resemblance, my mother will be so happy." So I was like, "Oh fine, I'll do that." August Baker: That was fun. Dr. Epstein: So I started the case out by describing him that way. And then, at the end- August Baker: It was charming, really. Dr. Epstein: Yeah, I had fun with that. August Baker: I had never read the D. H. Lawrence poem, the Snake, that you excerpt, and there's so much there. We could spend 45 minutes on it or a whole semester on it. Dr. Epstein: That was my most fun doing the audio book, was reading that poem out loud. I loved reading that. August Baker: The words he chooses are just amazing. Dr. Epstein: Incredible. August Baker: Each word, you could think, "How did that word come in there?" But to just look at the very ending, "And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords of life. And I have something to expiate: A pettiness." I'll just give you guys a prompt. You saw the whole poem as capturing a lot of what mindfulness does and what psychotherapy does, I guess. Dr. Epstein: Yeah. Both. I'm glad you're saying both. The poem is about D.H. Lawrence in Sicily, going into his backyard, into his garden, and seeing a snake coming up the wall, and he's captured by the majesty of the snake. But then, also gets afraid of it and says that his educated self wants to throw a log or throw a rock at the snake to get rid of it. And he ends up doing that and sees the snake scurrying away and then realizes he's destroyed the moment, basically. There, he was, able to be in dialogue with one of the lords of the underworld or something like that. I didn't know the poem either. One of my patients told me about the poem. The snake, it's been a symbol forever for everything, from the kundalini, to the unconscious, going back to Adam and Eve. So I saw it as a metaphor for both, for being able to look at the horror of oneself, as one has to do often in psychotherapy, but also at all the raw, sometimes violent aspects of ourselves that we come face-to-face with in deep meditation. All the ways that we've hurt people, that when you're sitting with your own mind for long periods of time, that's what you end up reflecting on. Or your deepest fears, your sense of shame, your deepest cravings, your anger, your frustration, all that stuff. There's a big tendency in the meditation world to sort of leapfrog over that and just hope for the bliss that's been promised to you by all the self-help books. But that's not necessarily what really happened. So I'm trying to make that point. August Baker: And the snake comes up even earlier, in the Buddha story, that you've given earlier. Dr. Epstein: Yeah, the snake comes. Mucalinda is the big snake in the Buddha story, where he comes up behind the Buddha, and he's like a cobra, and puts his hood over the Buddha and shields him from the rain and from the sun and so on. August Baker: That was the best way I could think of it also. And one of the points you make is that when the Dalai Lama wrote the introduction to your first book, when you got it, you write that it took you a while to appreciate it because it said things like... He wrote, "The purpose of life is to be happy. As a Buddhist, I have found that one's own mental attitude is the most influential factor in working toward that goal. In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves. Inner peace is the key." And I thought it was very interesting. You were sort of incredulous. Then, what clarified it for me was you said that the Dalai Lama means by inner peace is not what we might think. Namely, relaxation, or the state of, what do you call it- Dr. Epstein: Acquiescence, maybe. August Baker: ... hypometabolic. Dr. Epstein: Right. Yes. Scientific, the hypometabolic. August Baker: Right. Could you talk about what the Dalai Lama means by inner peace? Dr. Epstein: Well, what I came to believe that he meant by inner peace when... Because I was reflecting on it for decades. At first, when I read it, I was like, "Oh, inner peace, TM, the relaxation response, stress reduction," all that stuff. "Is that all that meditation is? Even the Dalai Lama, is he saying..." But then, I spent a lot of time over the years listening to the Dalai Lama's teachings. The more I listened, the more I realize, "Oh yeah, he's talking about nonviolence, like inner nonviolence. He's talking about weaponizing our own minds. He's talking about how each one of us has destructive tendency that we deploy either on ourselves, or on the people that we love and need the most, or on people we perceive as our enemies, but what's that doing for the world?" So really dealing with our own aggression, really dealing with our own anger, with our own rage, with our own frustration. How do we really deal with that in a way that de-weaponizes it? August Baker: There were a lot of great examples about that in the book. At one point you say, "It's not what you are thinking that matters, it's how you relate to your thoughts that will make all the difference." You say, "If Zach could see his negative thoughts, not as a reflection of his inherent inadequacy, but as the understandable misperceptions of where he was, he might not feel so much shame." Another patient, "Cultivate an attitude of forgiveness about a divorce situation." The whole love thoughts, I think, captures that. Another time, "If I am successful with Margaret, I will get her to mindfully observe her self hatred rather than remaining a victim of it." There's lots of examples of this, but that seemed to be one of the key points. Dr. Epstein: That is definitely one of the key, if not the only key. Because that phrase, "It's not what you're thinking that matters or it's not what you're experiencing that matters, it's how you relate to it." That I stole from Joseph Goldstein, one of my main meditation teachers, Buddhist teachers. Because every time I would go on retreat with him, I would smuggle a little notebook into the retreat with me, because you're not supposed to write anything or read anything, but just in case I had a revelation. And he would give that teaching in one form or another. And every time I would hear it, I would be like, "Oh, that is really the essence of everything. It's not what's going on in my mind, it's how I relate to it. That's what meditation is giving me, that's what it's teaching me, to relate from that place of allowance, of forgiveness, of kindness, of generosity, with humor," all of that. So I would write down some version of that. And then, every 10 years or so, I would look through this notebook when I was trying to write something, and I would see I had written the same thing over and over again. So finally, I'm able to talk about it as if it's mine. August Baker: It really came through. Typically, we try to make these 45 minutes, and I have about a million more things I want to talk to you about. Let's talk about Hate in the Counter-Transference, the Winnicott... I'll just mention, you make the good point that Western psychotherapy often uses the metaphor of development. That something has gone wrong in development and that the Buddhist approach doesn't necessarily go that way. That seemed very clear. Let's talk about Hate in the Counter-Transference. The word hate is pretty strong. And one of the things he says is, the baby can hate the mother, the mother hates the baby. And one of the lines is, "Sentimentality is useless for parents as it contains a denial of hate." I thought that was great. But when I mention that to people now, culturally, it's like, "I don't want to go that far." And another line, I'll just give you one. He says, "However much the analyst loves her patients, she cannot avoid hating them and fearing them." And finally, "As an analyst, I have ways of expressing hate." You think, "Well, no, the analyst is nurturing and empathetic. How do they show hate?" He says, "Hate is expressed by the existence of the end of the hour." I would just like to hear your thoughts on that because I just find there's a lot of reluctance for people to acknowledge hate in themselves. It seems to be a very difficult one. You talk about anger at the end of... Your discussion's fascinating. But anyway, what comes to mind? Dr. Epstein: Well, Hate in the Counter-Transference, that's a very important paper by this British child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst named Donald Winnicott, who, like John Cage... I would say John Cage and Winnicott are my two grandfather figures, because I think Winnicott is a great Buddhist teacher, although he didn't know that he was a great Buddhist teacher, I don't think. But he knew he was doing something. So whenever I'm teaching work in a workshop thing with Robert Thurman, or Sharon Salzberg, or Joseph, or whatever, when I'm teaching to Buddhist audiences, I have found that if I take this paper of Winnicott's, Hate in the Counter-Transference, and read them bits of it, that it's magnificent. Because it's making an important point, but not one that people necessarily want to hear, about how central anger and even hate or rage is to our psychic experience. And if we're sentimental about it and pretend that, "Oh, no, I'm a meditator and I love everybody, including myself," we're missing what meditation is really good for. What it can really do. So this- August Baker: And what therapy's really good for. Dr. Epstein: Exactly. Winnicott's equating child rearing, in particular in his time, the '40s and '50s, the mother's relationship with the infant. He's saying, "No way does the mother not sometimes hate the baby." The baby, of course, is a ball of every emotion that the human is capable of. Desire, need, love, anger, rage. His favorite word for the baby is ruthless. Like, the baby attacks the mother ruthlessly with no regard for her wellbeing. Therefore, the mother sometimes feels like, "Oh my God, get me out of here." Feels hate. But because the maternal thing is so strong, the mother naturally doesn't give into her hate, the good enough mother, that's Winnicott's phrase, doesn't abandon and doesn't retaliate. Those are the two poles that Winnicott sets up. Something in the mother, which is her inherent kindness or her maternal aptitude stays present with the hate, of the hate of the baby and her own hate, stays present enough to feed, change, sing, hold the baby. So the mother has this natural capacity and Winnicott was always reinforcing, "Well, you don't need teaching for this. You don't need science for this. It's there in you already. You know how to hold..." Thich Nhat Hanh used to say, "Hold anger like a baby." So the mother knows how to hold the range of emotion. So when Winnicott's point is the therapist is doing something similar, in particular when he or she is repairing early developmental struggles, where maybe the mother or the father didn't do it so well, did avoid or did retaliate. And so, created some kind of reaction in the child that gets carried into adulthood. My point is that something very similar applies in meditation also, that one of the things we're learning with mindfulness is how to bring out that maternal aptitude, that ability to stay with kindness with the entire range of our emotional experience. And that we all have that potential. Even if we've been hurt, even if we've been traumatized, even if we're sitting on a lot of our own difficult emotions, we can find that observing self, that maternal self, or now we could even say that paternal kind of mind. And I like to use all those examples because they're not the traditional ones that are used in Buddhism because Buddhism didn't really have a developmental psychology the way we have developed post-Freud. August Baker: Right. Well, I really enjoyed the book. I'll tell you lastly, the image of being out in the ocean with Ron Doss was just unforgettable, just goosebumps. It was really something. It was really great talking with you, Dr. Mark Epstein. The book is The Zen of Therapy. Dr. Epstein: Yep. August Baker: And it was great talking with you. Dr. Epstein: It was great talking with you too. I'm so glad you really read the book and liked... Or listened to the book. August Baker: Listened, yes. Dr. Epstein: Listened and liked it. So that means so much to me. Thank you very much. August Baker: Okay. Great.

William Miller

On second thought: How ambivalence shapes your life: From the founder of Motivational Interviewing

The rich inner world of a human being is far more complex than either/or. You can love and hate, want to go and want to stay, feel both joy and sadness. Psychologist William Miller—one of the world's leading experts on the science of change—offers a fresh perspective on ambivalence and its transformative potential in this revealing book. Rather than trying to overcome indecision by force of will, Dr. Miller explores what happens when people allow opposing arguments from their "inner committee members" to converse freely with each other. Learning to tolerate and even welcome feelings of ambivalence can help you get unstuck from unwanted habits, clarify your desires and values, explore the pros and cons of tough decisions, and open doorways to change. Vivid examples from everyday life, literature, and history illustrate why we are so often "of two minds," and how to work through it.

Reviews

"This is the definitive read on mixed feelings: why we have them, how to change them, and when to accept them. Dr. Miller is a trailblazer in psychology—he combines a scientist's expertise with a therapist's empathy, and I have no ambivalence about recommending his book. His wisdom will stay with you long after you've finished the last page." —Adam Grant, PhD, author of Think Again "I love the way Dr. Miller uses personal stories to show that ambivalence isn't just an abstract phenomenon; it is essential to decision making. Anyone who reads this remarkable book will quickly begin to apply its content to their own life, from pivotal turning points at different junctures in their past to choices they need to make today." —Don Kuhl, MS, Founder, The Change Companies "Dr. Miller skillfully integrates psychological knowledge about ambivalence with delightful examples from literature, theater, history, business, and more. This book offers evidence-based tools for how to examine ambivalence, whether your own or someone else's. Dr. Miller demystifies ambivalence in order to help you make decisions aligned with your values and interests, and move forward with desired changes in your life." —Naomi B. Rothman, PhD, Department of Management, Lehigh University "Reflecting Dr. Miller's expertise and his passion for understanding the human condition, this book takes a deep dive into human decision making. When our choices are loaded with implications, ambivalence can be stressful or even paralyzing. But we can also learn from it. Dr. Miller explains that ambivalence is a virtue, and invites us to think about it in productive new ways." —Molly Magill, LICSW, PhD, Brown University School of Public Health "This is the first book to dive deeply into ambivalence, a basic human condition that every helping professional must learn to address. The book provides concrete examples of what different types of ambivalence look like, so that providers can learn to lean into ambivalence with exploration instead of overlooking it until behavior change is stymied. Miller's unique approach is transtheoretical and practical, providing a useful guide for clinical practice in many domains and contexts. I highly recommend this book for all practitioners hoping to maximize their clients' (and their own) human potential." —Sylvie Naar, PhD, Distinguished Endowed Professor, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine, College of Medicine, and Director, Center for Translational Behavioral Science, Florida State University

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1: Welcome to the [podcast]. I'm August Baker. And today we're speaking with Dr. William R. Miller. Many of you know who Dr. Miller is. If you don't, I would say that if there were a Nobel prize for clinical psychology, he would've won it. This is the Miller of Miller and Rollnick and Motivational Interviewing, which Dr. Miller started with when he was researching and treating alcohol use. This expanded into drug use, behavioral addictions, like gambling, and took off from their healthcare, diabetes, hypertension, then into psychotherapy, social work, corrections, you name it, education, sports, management. And it's now being taught and practiced in at least 60 languages on six continents and studied in over 1600 clinical trials. We are not talking about that Miller and Rollnick book today. We're talking about a new book that Dr. Miller has published in 2022. It's called On Second Thought: How Ambivalence Shapes your Life. Dr. Miller is the emeritus distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. Welcome Dr. Miller. It's a great pleasure to speak with you. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 1: So ambivalence, what is ambivalence to start off? Speaker 2: Well, it's being drawn in different directions simultaneously. It's a feeling of I don't want it at the same time, it's a normal actually daily human experience and seems to be pretty common to human nature because this idea crosses cultures rather well. Ironically, no one was ambivalent before 1910, because that's when the term was invented by Eugene Boyer and popularized by Freud. And before that, that just didn't seem to be this idea of simultaneously being conflicted and pulled in two different directions. I'm sure people were ambivalent before that, but we just didn't have that word in our language. Speaker 1: Yeah. I think the same thing is true with the word empathy. Also a fairly recent word. Speaker 2: I don't know. I haven't looked that up. Speaker 1: Right. So I think that that's interesting. And one of the things we're talking about of course is making choices. And on the one hand this, on the other hand that. Actually one of your definitions of ambivalence I liked was on the one hand, and on the other hand, an octopus is doomed to multivalence. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: It's a good way to remember it. So we're talking about making decisions, but we're also talking about having different emotions at the same time. Speaker 2: And it's a very rich part of human experience. I mean, sometimes people think of ambivalence as a problem. I just think of it as part of human nature and even a virtue. And it's like the dissonance in music. It just gives some richness to it. Speaker 1: And yet one of the things you covered late in the book is binary thinking. And it occurs to me that we kind of, in talking to each other, we expect each other to be binary. So for example, when you said that to me, that was aggressive. No, I didn't intend to be aggressive. Well, if you really looked at all your emotions, are you sure there's not any bit of aggression in there? Right. Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and we get a political survey and it says, do you favor or not favor? And you don't have the option of, "Well, in some ways I favor. And in some ways I don't." You're expected to choose binary. Speaker 1: So one of the great things about this book is it's got a lot of really interesting experimental results that I had not heard of before, and it also has some really personal some of your own personal experiences. One of them, I actually work with parents of children with, or you might say, or neuro atypical children. And you talk about how to view as a parent, how to view a child, how to hold at one time, both all parts of what is happening with a child. Speaker 2: Yes. I think I used the terms hope and despair. And you don't have to choose between those. I mean, there's certainly times, especially difficult times as a parent when you feel both of those things, you feel some desperation and despair about what's happening and you also retain some hope that things will be better and it's not like one or the other of those is the truth. They're both truth and you can hold them simultaneously. You can hold them together. And we have that rich capability as human beings. It doesn't have to be either or. It can be both and. Yes and. Speaker 1: Right. And that doesn't come naturally. I mean, I think in your book, you talked about how we love to take sides. We love to go one from one side to the other. It may be natural that we have both feelings, but it's not natural to hold them both, in my sense. Go ahead. Speaker 2: Well, there are individual differences here. I think it comes easier to some people than others. Some people just have much more tolerance for ambiguity and ambivalence and don't feel like they have to decide others of us, and I lean on this side of things, just want to make a decision and get on with it. And even if it wasn't the best decision I got it decided and I moved on. I'm married to a woman who is the opposite on that dimension, which is a good thing. I mean, we balance each other out so I can make decisions pretty well. When it's a major decision, you're going to buy a house and so forth. It's often wise to have someone say, "Well, why don't we consider some other options here before we go ahead?" So it's that balance. And some of us are just much more comfortable with tolerating, really, ambivalence and ambiguity than other people are. Speaker 1: Right. And that reminds me of another, you used the words, extroversion and introversion in the book in a way that I hadn't heard of before, a more general usage of it in terms of how one goes about making decisions. Speaker 2: Yeah, that was out of Carl Jung. Yeah. People often think of extroversion as being outgoing and introversion as shyness, but that's a much bigger sense of that. The introverted people, and I'm one of those, tend to mull things over internally and work on it for a while. And maybe not even say anything about it until you've kind of reached a resolution or a conclusion. So you'd be quietly ambivalent about things. Extroverted people, and I'm married to one, it's helpful in making decisions to talk it through with people and you hear yourself saying it out loud and it just helps you work it through. And those kinds of people can misunderstand each other, particularly around the issue of how final, what I just said is. If an introvert says something like I want to divorce, I really have been thinking about it for a long time and working on it, processing it. An extrovert might be just be kind of trying it out as one possibility, and we're going to talk about this and see where it goes. So it's pretty easy to misunderstand each other around those kinds of personality differences. Speaker 1: Yeah. That's very interesting. One of the things that you talk about is also just in general, ambivalence coming from, sources of ambivalence, coming from within yourself and then also coming socially. And let's talk about the social part. Now this part will be familiar to people who are familiar with MI. You have someone who is ambivalent, and so what you should do of course is persuade them. Tell them all the reasons that are on your side. Speaker 2: That's what your gut wants to do, even professional helpers. We go into this profession because we want to help. And there's just something that you don't want to convince. You want to persuade. You want to encourage the person and with an ambivalent person, that's actually the wrong thing to do. If you think about ambivalence as having both arguments within you, I want it and I don't want it, and this is classic in addictions, I mean think of a smoker, what smoker these days doesn't know they're taking a chance with their life of having a pretty ugly death and so on. And at the same time they enjoy what they're doing, and they feel both things. Speaker 2: If I champion quitting smoking, if I tell them what they already know, which is the ways in which smoking is not good for them, their natural response is to defend it. And then if I tell them, they really ought to quit smoking, their natural response is to say, "No, I don't. I don't want to do that." What you're doing is acting out the person's ambivalence, but doing it unfortunately in the wrong way, because I, as a helper, am taking all the good lines, all the pro change lines and causing the person to argue against change and say, "No, it's not really that, it's not as serious problem. I don't want do that. It's just not where I am right now." Speaker 2: And that's not neutral. As people hear themselves say those things, they get more committed to them. And so what you're doing actually is the reverse of what you hope to accomplish because you're causing the person to argue more and more for not changing, for continuing to do what it is that they're doing now. And that's an important realization. That does lie at the heart of motivational interviewing. Speaker 1: Yes. Stunningly helpful in this book, you think a lot about how that ties in with the social sphere, with authority and hierarchies, and you talk about this concept of reactance. Speaker 2: Yeah. The normal reaction to being given unsolicited advice is either not to do it or to do the opposite. Now that's not what you hope for when you're giving somebody advice, of course. If someone asks you for advice, that's a little different situation, but in the kind of unwelcome or unrequested advice you can expect, the normal response will be to not do it at least if not to do the opposite. Now, why is that? Speaker 2: Well, I cite some evolutionary research from this psychologist in Australia who talks about dominance hierarchies in the animal kingdom. Wolves and lions have really worked out well, how you decide who's in charge. You can become the alpha animal if you have the stuff for it. Fortunately, that doesn't mean you have to kill all the other animals. That would not be good for survival. And so there's a way of yielding. With wolves, I used the example, with wolves, what the wolf does when it's losing is, but its head up and open its throat, which means that the alpha wolf could tear its throat out. But it doesn't. That's the end of the fight right there. So they both survive and they both know who's in charge. Speaker 2: Now, when somebody's giving you advice that you haven't asked for, they're kind of assuming a dominant position, they're kind of taking a one up position conscious of it or not. And if you follow that advice, if you obey the advice, you're accepting a kind of one down position. That just doesn't feel right to human beings. Most the time you can agree to a situation, you enroll in the military where that's going to be the case. But for most people who, freedom of choice, they just don't like feeling one down. And so what you want to do is to assert your freedom and say, "No, I don't have to do that. I'm not going there." And that's that kind of underlying motivation underneath psychological reactance, which is it feels like I'm being controlled, manipulated, bossed around dominated. I'm going to do something to push back against that and say, "No, I'm in charge here." Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: Now in healthcare. That's a problem because you go into the doctor's office, you're in your underwear, the doctor's wearing a white coat. The authority is clearly there. Gives you healthcare advice and then you go home and you get to decide whether you're going to do it or not. And most people don't follow healthcare advice. Speaker 1: Right? Yeah. You get the example of the going to the dentist. Speaker 2: Yeah, no, we have that kind of, nobody's going to tell me what to do feeling. It may not even be conscious, but it's there. And so when you're dealing with something about which people are ambivalent and that's most of the time actually, to try to persuade, to try to convince, to try to make the person do it is a losing battle. You cannot make people change. Speaker 1: And what a concept for parenting also. Speaker 2: Indeed, indeed. Yeah. Speaker 1: I thought one of the interesting things you said that was persuasion and advice are often attempts to convince from the Latin root [foreign language 00:14:25] to defeat, conquer or overcome. Speaker 2: So it doesn't feel good on receiving end. That's right. Speaker 1: So this is not in your book. So I apologize, but I just thought about the vaccines. Speaker 2: Oh, sure. Speaker 1: Right. Is that what you think about when you see, I mean, people just don't want ... On either side, people don't want to be told what to do. Speaker 2: Well, it's gotten even more complex than that actually. It's gotten polarized. I've said in the book, one thing that kind of amplifies response to ambivalence is if you identify that is not taking advice, not taking a vaccine, it's not just an opinion of mine. It's who I am. That's me. Or taking the vaccine is who I am. I mean, that's me. And so to have that question, to get into a dialogue about that, you're really talking about your worth as a person. Now that's a big jump and that's kind of where many of us are with vaccines. I think that this is not only, not just my opinion, this is more than my opinion. This is my tribe. Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. Speaker 2: This is who I am. Speaker 1: This is my people. I get that sense. And one of the things I realized while reading your book was so in your book, you're trying to persuade people. And I find myself, in the one sense I bought the book, I'm interested in it. And so it's kind of like, it's not really unsolicited advice, but I even felt myself trying to think about, "Well, is this right? Is that not right?" Always reading it a critical [inaudible 00:16:18] Speaker 2: No, that's my intention to give you information with which you can make better decisions and not get trapped by this dynamic of, "Well, this is me," or "Can't do that," or whatever to understand that when someone's trying to persuade you that you're going to naturally want to not do it, but that doesn't mean you have to not do it. The irony is that we don't take advice even if we agree with it. Speaker 1: Right. Yes. Speaker 2: It's that powerful. Speaker 1: Yes. Now, after the, you're talking about the social aspect, chapter six, you go into the depths, you might say, make a distinguish between horizontal and vertical ambivalence. Speaker 2: Yes. Because part of your ambivalence can be unconscious. You're not aware of half of your ambivalence essentially. So in your conscious mind you're thinking one way about things, but there's another really significant part of you that is not so sure or even takes the opposite kind of position. Now that's a tricky one and you find yourself saying, "Why did I do that? I don't understand. I really got caught up in this and I don't get what's going on. Speaker 2: Well, part of it can be this unconscious desire to move in a different direction. I think an example I use is the kind of people that you get attracted to, romantically attracted to. And I certainly have treated people who unfortunately were just wired to be attracted to exactly the wrong kind of person for them, often trying to undo some childhood learning. So I think I gave two examples of that, but one was a woman who kept just falling madly in love with these guys who were pretty distant and not very feeling and pretty tightly controlled.With the sense that deep inside there there's a teddy bear. And I want to find that teddy bear. And so she just, I mean chemically drawn to these kinds of guys. Of course, what happens is as they get in relationship, she wants that teddy bear and begins to demand more and more for him to be feeling and expressive. And when you demand that if somebody who's in uncomfortable with it, they pull away. Then she gets angry. Speaker 1: Really angry. She ended up in the ER and or in handcuffs. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes. You can end in violence even. It just occurred me one day to say, tell me about your father. And she said, "Well, Dad, he never told us he loved this. We kind of knew he did." And then it just dawned on her, "Oh my God, I've been trying to get my father to love me and choosing guys who are uncomfortable with feelings and uncomfortable with expressing emotion in love, to try to make them love me, which I didn't get from my father." That was all unconscious for a long time. And I won't say that making it conscious, solved the problems necessarily, but nonetheless, she now understood better what she was doing and could try something different. How about dating guys who were warm and interesting and feeling and care about you? So that's just one example, but she was so puzzled by why relationship after relationship after relationship with what seemed to her to be very different people, would always crash in the same way. So in those situations, there probably is an unconscious component working against the conscious component. And those are difficult puzzling ones. Speaker 1: And this was one of the cases where you were very personal and talking about your own ambivalence about having children. Now, some people, the therapeutic encounter really helps. It seems like for you, it was not something that it was a realization that you came to on your own without talking to a therapist necessarily. Speaker 2: Well, not exactly. I mean, I've been in men's groups for decades, so these are guys that get together and we just talk to each other about our lives. We're not talking about sports and stuff. We're saying what's going on in your life right now. And so, although they're not trained therapists, nonetheless guys in this kind of group know me pretty well. And when something new comes into my life, they kind of understand the history of it also. And what a gift that is. So first the situation was my cover story was that I didn't really want to have kids. I just didn't have those feelings, wasn't that interested in having children. And I went back to a men's group that I'd been part of seven years before and was talking about this and the guy next to me in whose house we're meeting said, "Are you still dealing with that?" Speaker 2: And I said, "Yeah, I just don't have any particular feelings about kids." And he said, "Bullshit." I said, this was a kind of warm guy. I said, "Wait, what?" And what he said, "When you came in here tonight, what'd you do?" I said, "Well, I talked to your kids and sat on the floor with them for a while." He said, "Then what did you do?" "Well, it was time for them to go to bed. And so I kind of tucked them in and told them the story." And he said, "Yeah, every time I see you in a room with adults and kids, you're on the floor with the kids. What's that about?" Well I didn't in that moment, understand what was going on. It was in a pretty dramatic moment when I got a download of memories from my father that I had not remembered consciously. Speaker 2: My sister died when she was eight and I was 13. And that was one of those before and after moments in life. And I remembered my father after that event, consciously as kind of bitter depressed, withdrawn, he was clinically depressed actually, and just kind of unavailable. And then in this moment that I describe in the book, I got back all these memories of my father before she died, before my sister died, who was warm and loving and on the floor with us and playing and fun. And some part of me said, "Anything that can do that to a man, no thanks." And I could then look at that as an adult. And with that download of memories, I realized what had been going on. There was a part of me scared to death of having children that I wasn't even aware of or why I was feeling that way. Speaker 1: Because it's such a risk and it can do that to someone. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. That you can't have it any other way. That's how it is. So it is scary. And you enter into a love relationship knowing that you're vulnerable, that you're taking a risk. So that was my own personal example of a conflict or an ambivalence where part of it, I just was not conscious of, but the guys around me could see it. They couldn't quite figure it out, but they knew there was something going on there that I just wasn't in touch with. Speaker 1: Interesting. It shows how we have access to our thoughts that other people don't have. But sometimes other people can see us more clearly than we can see ourselves. Speaker 2: Indeed, indeed. And we don't have access to all of our thoughts and memories. True. We're very, very selective in what we can remember and that can change with mood. It can change with all kinds of things. Speaker 1: In responding to ambivalence. You talk about two basic approaches, shutting down and resolving. Tell me about shutting down first. Speaker 2: Well, that's something we can do. I mean, you can just not think about it because it's uncomfortable to think about it. And in fact, that's kind of a normal pattern when you're feeling ambivalent, you think about a reason why you ought to make this change, quit smoking or whatever it is. Then you think of a reason why you don't want to do that. And then you stop thinking about it because it's kind of uncomfortable. And so it doesn't get resolved. Now, ambivalence doesn't have to be resolved. You can live with it, you can embrace it like dissonance in music and say, "This is just a part of, this is how life is. If I'm going to enter into this loving relationship. I do it knowing that I'm vulnerable, knowing that I'm taking a risk here," but one human style is just to shut it down. Speaker 2: We tend to get extreme in that and identify with one side of it, say, "This side is the truth. The other side is not me. I don't feel that way. That's wrong." And Jung called it the shadow. We kind of sequester those things in a part of us that we're not conscious of and just say, no, the truth is this one side of things. I prefer to have a leader who doesn't do that prematurely, at least who looks at both sides of things and weighs it a bit, takes a little bit of time to decide rather than impulsively shutting down one side and just automatically going with the other. So it had implications for leadership and parenting and just all kinds of things. Speaker 2: But the other thing besides shutting down is then to do things, to try to work through and just make a decision, make a conscious decision even knowing that you still are going to feel ambivalent in some ways that "No, this is what I'm going to do." One guy was counseling about his drinking, came in, I think I mentioned this story in the book too, came in under pressure from his wife who said, "I'm going to leave you and take the kids unless you do something about your drinking." And so I spent a few sessions with him and he was then talking about quitting drinking. And so I said, "So, you weren't too sure about it, but as you look at it, what you're thinking about is quitting drinking. Is that what you want to do?" Speaker 2: He said, "No." You know what? And I guess I must have looked puzzled because he said, "No, no, it's not what I want to do. It's what I'm going to do." We do things all the time that are the right thing to do because they're the right thing to do, even though it's not particularly what we would prefer to do or want to do. So there's a lot going on in ambivalence. I mean I love researching and writing this book and surprisingly little has been written for the general public on ambivalence, which is such a common human common and a rich part of life. And I learned a lot by reading the research that's out there on ambivalence as well. Speaker 1: I thought that another great story was that if you could tell our listeners those about the man who was picking up his kids from the library. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's a published story. Yeah. This was a smoker. I mean dependent smoker, clearly committed smoker and his kids are down at the public library and he drives down to get them and it's raining and the kids aren't out front when he gets there. So he kind of pulls into the curb and he's fumbling through his pockets and looking in the glove compartment and under the seat and no cigarettes and he really wants a cigarette and he says, "You know what, there's a store just around the corner. I can run around there and get it." And then he turns on the engine is ready to pull out and looks in the rear view mirror and sees his children coming out of the library, into the rain and says to himself, "I think I can get to the store and get back before they get too wet." And about three feet later, he was a non-smoker. He said, "God, I'm a man who would leave his children standing in the rain to chase a drug. That is not okay." And that was it for him. Speaker 2: So we can have those moments too, that resolve ambivalence, particularly when something comes into conflict with something that's much more important to you. Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's kind of was a gift that he had that moment. Speaker 2: And shared it. Yeah. It's a wonderful story. Speaker 1: Yeah. And there's just so much complicate, we complicate or we- Speaker 2: We are complicated. Speaker 1: We are. And one of the things you talk about, I thought this was fascinating. If you have acted negatively toward or harmed someone, even unintentionally, there's a risk of denigrating or devaluating, the person to diminish ambivalent guilt feelings, unconscious defensive reasoning is, "If I was unkind, then they must have deserved it." That seemed so intuitively or viscerally true to me. Speaker 2: We want to explain it to ourselves. "If I was mean to that person. Well, it's not because I'm a bad person. They really deserved it in some way." So you begin talking to yourself about that and in the process, get meaner with that toward that person. Fortunately it works the other way too, that if you're kind of ambivalent about somebody and you do something kind for them, you tend to move in the direction of relationship. And so we watch ourselves, we listen to ourselves talk and learn what we believe that way. We also watch ourselves behave and make decisions about what's happening based on what we do. And we're pretty kind to ourselves and give ourselves the benefit of the doubt typically. So that kind of explaining of behavior that may have happened for a completely different reason and become self-perpetuating. Speaker 1: This binary thinking, this trap of binary thinking. At one point, you thought that there was maybe, didn't look up the reference, but that there was maybe some hope that we were as a human race moving beyond that or past that. Doesn't seem that way looking at the news. But do you remember that site, I think it was to Wilber? Speaker 2: Oh, Ken Wilber. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean to say that is an act of faith, I think mean you can look at the sweep of centuries and say, I mean, in general- Speaker 1: I gotcha. Speaker 2: We've gotten more humane to each other over time. Speaker 1: I see. Speaker 2: But we go through periods where you say, "Oh, really have we?" And you can be an optimist or a pessimist, I'm a pathological optimist. And it makes a difference because your beliefs tend to come true. Now, maybe not at a societal level, but at least in relation to the people that you care about and people who are around you, we tend to act in a way that makes our beliefs come true. And so if you have a choice to be optimistic or pessimistic, why not choose optimism? Well, if not being disappointed is a terribly, terribly important thing for you then maybe you want to be the pessimist. So you're never disappointed. Right? Speaker 1: So Woody Allen kind of. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. For myself life makes more sense. And I think my relationships with others make more sense if I give the benefit of the doubt and expect the best of people and you can in the process, bring out the best in people. Speaker 1: The fake it till you make, is just such a, I don't know if that originated in AA, but it's just such a great slogan. Speaker 2: You certainly hear it there. Yeah. Speaker 1: You do. Speaker 2: It's an older idea of living as if. You're not yet where you want to be, live as if you are. You're not yet as compassionate person as you wish you were, be compassionate and you act yourself into character in the process. Speaker 1: Yeah. You talk about how you've been researching ambivalence forever and you have experience with it even beyond, as long as [inaudible 00:32:53] Speaker 2: Much longer than that. Yes. Speaker 1: I thought it was very interesting that you say after being tenured as a psychology professor, a vivid experience prompted me to wonder whether I had taken the wrong road and should resign my faculty. Speaker 2: Oh, yes. Speaker 1: To go to seminary. Speaker 2: It was kind of a mystical experience actually. I mean, I was off on basically a personal retreat or a pilgrimage [inaudible 00:33:19] and just had an unexplainable logically experience. And then I had to say, "Well, what now? What does that mean?" And here I am tenured, I got a career going. I did decide way back not to go to seminary and not to follow the path that I thought I was following from a child, from being a child and just kind of went, "Maybe I took the wrong turn back there." And instead of shutting it down, I was open to it and considered, asked people for advice about it, had conversations about it. And ironically, the seminary professors and pastors I talked to said, "You have an important ministry where you are right now." Speaker 2: Which is kind of what I was not accepting at the time. And it just helped me to say "No, no, you're on the right path. It's okay." But I really went through sometime when I was coming back from the retreat, I thought, how am I going to tell my wife that, "By the way, I'm thinking about going back to seminary." And I told her, and she said, "Well, if that's what God wants, we can do that." My immediate reaction was. "Damn it. I was counting on you to tell me I'm out of my mind." But I had to work with [inaudible 00:34:39] Speaker 1: She was practicing good motivational interviewing. Speaker 2: By no accident. Yes. Even Before it was invented. Speaker 1: Right, exactly. And towards the end, you say, ambivalence is not always best resolved. A longstanding tension for me is keeping work and balance with relationships and other life values. I thought that was a really important point. Speaker 2: Well, it certainly has been for me, because yeah, work will expand to fill whatever space you give it. And for me, at least it's fun also, man, I'm privileged to love the work that I had to do and could easily do more and more and more and more of it and let the rest of my life go and not just relationships, but other things that give my life meaning as well. And so keeping that imbalance has been an important thing for me and kind of constant. And I don't know if I said this in the book, but a colleague wants told me, "You know, you just need to enjoy living on the edge." Speaker 1: You did or running along the edge, I think. Speaker 2: Running along the edge. And the view. Enjoy the view, running on the edge of the cliff and don't get too close, but that's just kind of where you are as a person, keeping intention that both of those things mattered to you and keeping a balance. Speaker 1: Unfortunately we are out of time, but I wanted to ask one last question, which was you dedicated the book in loving memory of professor, Howe Arkwood, which I noticed was also your master's thesis. Can you tell us a little bit about that, your relationship with him? Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, Howe was just, was such a loving man. I mean, this is a guy who would put on a gorilla suit to thrill his children. So he wasn't locked into his professional image of a psychologist. And when I entered graduate school, I didn't know anything basically about psychology. He was very patient with that. He had invited me to consider things, but wanted me to do research on what I cared about and not do following his footsteps necessarily. So he showed me that kind of mentoring freedom of inspiring and not imposing, and love is just never imposed. It's just offered. And he also was very interested in ambivalence and has a book about it that's worth reading as well. And later in his life, he came back and got training in motivational interviewing. Speaker 1: That's great. Speaker 2: It was a full circle for me and now I'm mentoring my mentor. Speaker 1: That's great. Speaker 2: And we had a lovely relationship over the years and he died just a couple years ago. Speaker 1: Gotcha. Speaker 2: But this is the one I wanted to dedicate the book to. Speaker 1: Great. Professor Miller, thank you so much for talking to me today. I really appreciate it. Speaker 2: You're very welcome. Thank you.

Jon Mills

Debating relational psychoanalysis: Jon Mills and his critics

In Debating Relational Psychoanalysis, Jon Mills provides an historical record of the debates that had taken place for nearly two decades on his critique of the relational school, including responses from his critics.

Since he initiated his critique, relational psychoanalysis has become an international phenomenon with proponents worldwide. This book hopes that further dialogue may not only lead to conciliation, but more optimistically, that relational theory may be inspired to improve upon its theoretical edifice, both conceptually and clinically, as well as develop technical parameters to praxis that help guide and train new clinicians to sharpen their own theoretical orientation and therapeutic efficacy. Because of the public exchanges in writing and at professional symposiums, these debates have historical significance in the development of the psychoanalytic movement as a whole simply due to their contentiousness and proclivity to question cherished assumptions, both old and new. In presenting this collection of his work, and those responses of his critics, Mills argues that psychoanalysis may only advance through critique and creative refinement, and this requires a deconstructive praxis within the relational school itself.

Debating Relational Psychoanalysis will be of interest to psychoanalysts of all orientations, psychotherapists, mental health workers, psychoanalytic historians, philosophical psychologists, and the broad disciplines of humanistic, phenomenological, existential, and analytical psychology.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Arnold D. Richards.

Introduction: (Re)visioning Relational Psychoanalysis, Jon Mills.

1. A Critique of Relational Psychoanalysis, Jon Mills

2. Contextualizing is not Nullifying: Reply to Mills, Robert D. Stolorow, George E. Atwood, & Donna M. Orange

3. Assertions of Therapeutic Excess: A Reply to Mills, Marilyn S. Jacobs

4. "Neither Fish nor Flesh": Commentary on Jon Mills, Stuart A. Pizer

5. A Response to my Critics, Jon Mills

6. Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis Interview on New Books in Psychoanalysis ,Jon Mills & Tracy D. Morgan

7. Fine-Tuning Problems in Relational Psychoanalysis: New Directions in Theory and Praxis, Jon Mills

8. Introduction to The Relational Approach and its Critics: A Conference with Dr. Jon Mills, Aner Govrin

9. Challenging Relational Psychoanalysis: A Critique of Postmodernism and Analyst Self- Disclosure, Jon Mills

10. Straw Men, Stereotypes, and Constructive Dialogue: A Response to Mills' Criticism of the Relational Approach, Chana Ullman

11. On Multiple Epistemologies in Theory and Practice: A Response to Jon Mills' "Challenging Relational Psychoanalysis: A Critique of Postmodernism and Analyst Self-Disclosure", Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot

12. Relational Psychoanalysis and the Concepts of Truth and Meaning: Response to Jon Mills, Boaz Shalgi

13. Projective Identification and Relatedness: A Kleinian Perspective, Merav Roth

14. Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism: A Response to Dr. Jon Mills' "Challenging Relational Psychoanalysis: A Critique of Postmodernism and Analyst Self-Disclosure", Liran Razinsky

15. Relational Psychoanalysis Out of Context: Response to Jon Mills , Steven Kuchuck & Rachel Sopher

16. Challenging Relational Psychoanalysis: A Reply to My Critics Jon Mills

Author(s) Biography

Jon Mills, PsyD, PhD, ABPP is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is a faculty member in the postgraduate programs in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, emeritus professor of psychology and psychoanalysis, Adler Graduate Professional School, and runs a mental health corporation in Ontario, Canada. Recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship, he is the author and editor of over 20 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies.

Reviews

"Imagine a book on psychoanalysis that gets your heart racing and your own critical mind aroused into action! Jon Mills and his critics hold nothing back in their critique of the relational model and of each other. The reader has a front seat to a theoretical and practical boxing match that vitalizes the conversation, sharpens our theories and practices, prompting further debate and dialogue. In this provocative, deeply stirring and academically rigorous collection, we are challenged to be as thoughtful and thorough in our own theorizing and practices, as is Jon Mills and his contributors. This is a text that clarifies, informs and ultimately inspires."

Roy Barsness, PhD, Professor, The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology and the Brookhaven Institute of Psychoanalysis; author of Core Competencies in Relational Psychoanalysis.

"This is an exhilarating, refreshing, and brave volume. Why? Because Jon Mills is not afraid to challenge dogma and theoretical hegemony, to ask the reader to think with (or for that matter, against) him. Mills' commanding and passionate rhetorical and intellectual skills shine through as he engages both his sophisticated interlocutors and the vexing conundrums and aporias at the heart of contemporary psychoanalytic relational theorizing. The best kind of psychoanalytic journey, Debating Relational Psychoanalysis, offers a vigorous, rigorous, and ultimately compassionate and redemptive conversation between Mills, the critic, and Mills' critics, in which familiar thought is tested, and one's truths are turned over, maybe tossed aside, maybe reaffirmed with renewed (and newly philosophically grounded) conviction."

Jill Gentile, PhD, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; author of Feminine Law.

"Jon Mills tells us "There is nothing more exciting than a clash of ideas, except for, perhaps, sex." I think that says it all. His controversial critique of Relational Psychoanalysis is provocative on many grounds. And the often-heated responses by his critics reveal both intellectual differences and personal affronts. In the end, it is the reader who benefits from this unique dialogue between intellectuals nimbly defending their own ideas. It will force you to think harder, and feel more deeply, not only about what you believe, but also how you practice."

Karen J. Maroda, PhD, ABPP, author of Psychodynamic Techniques

August Baker: Hello, I'm August Baker with the New Books Network. Today we are talking with Dr. John Mills, a Canadian psychoanalyst, psychologist, and philosopher who was previously a guest on New Books Network about 10 years ago. He's a faculty member in the postgraduate programs in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at Adelphi University and Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School. He's the author and editor of over 20 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies. Today we're talking about the book Debating Rational Psychoanalysis, John Mills and His Critics. And so this is an interesting volume. It contains both Dr. Mills' writings and those of his critics. Roy Barsness said that, "This book was like having a front seat to a theoretical and practical boxing match." Jill Gentile called the book, "Exhilarating, refreshing, and brave," and Karen Maroda said that, "The often heated responses by his critics reveal both intellectual differences and personal affronts." Dr. Mills has been called quote, "The most important and profound spokesman to critique the relational psychoanalytic movement." It's a pleasure to speak with you. Welcome, Dr. Mills. Dr. John Mills: Thank you for having me. August Baker: So I wanted to start off by talking about these three terms, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and then relational psychoanalysis. I think of psychotherapy as being the broadest, and then psychoanalysis is a type of psychotherapy, and then relational psychoanalysis would be a type of that, but I'm wondering if you could maybe give just a placeholder definition for these things so we can understand what they are. Dr. John Mills: Well, this is a ongoing debate. We have a difficult time defining what psychoanalysis is and does, let alone what psychotherapy is and there's a lot of fine hair splitting when it comes to this. Then when we try to define what relationality is, you have a whole contingent of people who are debating what that really means. Maybe we should go with the conventional definition that psychotherapy is a form of a talk therapy that's based upon dialogue and communication. Of course, that would apply to the definition of psychoanalysis, but it really, I think, comes down to the historical differences in theoretical orientations, assumptions about human nature, and the frequency in furniture wars that exist between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. August Baker: Could you tell the listeners what you mean by that? I think I know frequency and furniture would be how many times a week you come and whether you lie on the couch. Dr. John Mills: Correct. Correct. I think that's misguided in today's culture. Psychoanalysis has to accommodate the types of people that seek them out and so I believe that in today's society, and particularly in North America, but maybe the United States in particular, that traditional psychoanalysis is a dead dog. Only a few people can have the luxury of attending many times a week and have the funds to do it. I'm in agreement with Lou Aaron that particularly a relational approach is becoming more mainstream among psychotherapeutic practitioners across the board that are drawn to the relational tradition but they don't have to be considered bonafide analysts. They're often people who are using psychodynamic and analytic approaches to their weekly treatment of the patients. August Baker: Okay, I understand that. I think that what people may not realize, although you are known, as I said before, the most profound critic of relational psychoanalysis, you are yourself a relational psychoanalyst, and you have a lot of good things to say about relational psychoanalysis. I think that this book has articles going back 20 years. It covers the history of this debate. I'm just wondering, as you look back, what would you say are the most important of the criticisms that you've made about relational psychoanalysis? Dr. John Mills: Well, I guess having written another book on this 10 years ago, I would think that the main criticisms I have is that the relational movement hasn't really developed its own coherent theory, so that is the thing that I would definitely like to see people work on in the future. I believe that some of the completely blown out of the water statements that some of the early writers that were contributing to this discussion are a complete negation of Freud, complete negation of classical analysis, which is completely misguided in my opinion. This is where the drive versus relational model gets misrepresented in the literature. As a philosopher studying German idealism and psychoanalysis, we had to read these texts. Anyone who's read Freud's Collected Works will immediately see that how easy he and his followers have been misrepresented in the literature. I think that's an important criticism that we don't need to have these extreme bifurcations when it's really about matters of emphasis. Looking at what classical theory has to contribute and building on that would be a better approach in my opinion. But of course, we know what revolutionaries do. They need to build up a movement. August Baker: Right. Dr. John Mills: When you find a straw man, it's easy to burn. August Baker: Right. Dr. John Mills: And then you set yourself apart as being unique and different. But then when you say things like, "This is a two person psychology or Freud only as a one person," that's not true. When you hear things like the myth of the isolated mind, that's completely not true. Nothing like this was in Freud's texts. The other, I guess, important, I think criticisms have been the almost wholesale adoption of the postmodern term. I have grave concerns about that because again, it's overstating things, particularly if you want to boil everything down to language, as if everything's a social construction. That's not the case. A similar approach would be in let's say in the sciences where everything's boiled down to a brain state. Well, that's not the case. August Baker: Mm-hmm. Dr. John Mills: So these extreme views of mind, of nature, of reality and truth in epistemology. Then I guess, although I find the entire approach to relational work to be one that I have identified with since my early career and have considered myself relational practitioner, that to what degree are we comfortable with the excesses that can easily happen and from the literature has happened when there's too much self-disclosure, self-revelation, counter transference, enactments, which is the big term today. I'm a little bit more conservative than some of my relational colleagues are in presenting their case work but that doesn't mean that I don't approach my work that way. August Baker: Right, I see that, and I got the sense from that, from reading the book. I think when I started reading the relational literature, I was also shocked by, because I had read Freud first, I was shocked by the mischaracterizations of Freudian theory and I was exasperated, angry. Then I wondered why. Why am I getting angry about this? Especially because ... Is it my identification with Freud or just sometimes I think, am I being pendant? Why can't relational analysts, a lot of them are analysts full time, not scholars, so they haven't read the standard edition. I find myself exasperated, but I also kind of wonder why I am so exasperated. Just to be provocative, what's wrong with the relational analyst today not knowing Freud at all and having a mischaracterization? Dr. John Mills: Well, for whoever that applies to, let's say arbitrarily, if they haven't read Freud, then they really have no business critiquing Freud. Most of the literature draws upon secondary sources and you don't see them delving into these texts that you would see in the humanities. A lot of other analysts who work full-time as clinicians are also very focused upon clinical work and not necessarily on where our roots are. August Baker: Mm-hmm. Dr. John Mills: And that is looking at historically some of these leading seminal texts that should be required for anyone who studies psychoanalysis. But also the whole movement, the whole movement of psychoanalysis, the mere fact that Jung was just airbrushed out of history is amazing. The rich writings and view of life that he has to offer and the soul. But again, these are also political things. People may not be interested in theory and scholarship, but they really should be. I don't know if I would say I was angry reading these things, but kind of astonished that some of it would even be published because it's just patently false or wrong. August Baker: Right. That kind of brings me to the next question. When you started pointing this out, pointing these things out, you evoked a lot of strong reactions, and I was wondering why you think that was? What sort of chords did you strike? Why did it creates such heat? Dr. John Mills: Well, I was a relatively young person coming on the scene, so let's say I was probably mid-thirties when I started publishing a great deal, and the original critique article is what brought the heat. I can't, of course, know what people's internal emotional states are or their motivations or their conflicts or why they would feel so personal about a critique of ideas but we all know of our narcissistic inclinations all too well. I think that one thing that philosophy taught me was you needed to develop a capacity to argue for your position, and that always involves critique, and involves originality, and it also means that you don't take things personally. That's also what the role of science is. It's to follow up on models, ideas, and if they can't be verified, you abandon them but you don't get angry at your audience if certain high scientific hypothesis don't prove out to have any evidence or validity. I think a lot of this is that people were offended that their ideas were being critiqued and their overly identified with them also is due to a lot of political and power differentials that exist among the codery of friends. August Baker: Right. Yeah. It's interesting. I think you suggest this, if not say it, the relational movement talks about the importance of being nurturing and kind and supportive, and it's almost like that carried over into the scholarly work. We want to be supportive of each other's scholarly work, not ruthless critique, as you say. Dr. John Mills: Well, clearly in the last two books that came out on, I think it's a idealizing relational psychoanalysis and another critical examination, if you carefully go through those books, read them where they're supposed to be critiquing each other, it still seems very much like a circle of friends having some minor disagreements rather than, let's say, in the tradition of critical theory that one would be ruthless about these things. August Baker: Right. Yeah. I also had the sense that when relational psychoanalysts have written histories, there's a tendency to want to validate each certain theorist along the way as improving on the one before, and in that sense, the originator Freud just becomes that author who was improved upon 17 times. Dr. John Mills: But I think that's what the buddy system's about, right? Mutual self-promotion. August Baker: Right. One of the things that you draw attention to is the comparison of psychoanalysis and philosophy and know thy self as something that you could tie in with both philosophy and psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. I was wondering how would you distinguish those two, first of all? Clearly we might say that philosophy would be important for everyone, but or psychoanalysis would only be for people who, what? Can't ... Well, first of all, they have the resources to benefit from this but also there would be ... There are people who can achieve insight and authenticity without therapy. Do you have any sense of what then distinguishes the enterprise of philosophy from the enterprise of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis? Dr. John Mills: Well, there's a lot of differences. I think the difference is really on the focus and the goals, and so at the same time, there's a lot of overlap to such a degree is it's very hard to tease out anything that really stands apart from archaic ontology, so to speak. It's been said that Plato is the first psyche analysts. His entire introduction to this Dialogues to the Western World was the first textual introduction to philosophical thinking. What's he focus on? He focused on the soul. Hence when Aristotle comes and then basically he creates the edifice for where we are today, largely, it's hard to think about how psychoanalysis is a unique or distinct theory. I think the main distinction, though, would be that Freud introduces the centrality of the unconscious in all these aspects of psychic life that had been talked about by the ancients. Now, when it comes to a method of healing or a method of treatment, given that we are relatively speaking, we're still in the infancy, if you think that psychology as a formal discipline did not even become organized until late 19th century, so we're only talking over 100 years, but there's been always attempts at internal healing, at amelioration of internal conflicts or external conflicts, and various types of cultures had their own indigenous or shamanic types of healing practices and rituals as does religion. August Baker: We think of the confessional as a one possible forerunner of therapy. Dr. John Mills: Yeah, absolutely. But in our modern era now, this is different because people often aren't coming into treatment because they want to ponder the universe. They're coming into treatment for specific existential reasons that have to do with the quality of their phenomenal life, their relationships with other people. These are the main things that bring people into treatment. They're not happy. That's a little bit different than more of a pedagogical type of approach to reading and discussing philosophy. August Baker: I think, I can only speak, well, I can't even speak to Being and Time really, but I certainly can't speak to anything after Being and Time but if you think about Heidegger and Being and Time, there is a sense of crisis there of a need to uncover clear. I know you mentioned, what is it? Aletheia? Dr. John Mills: Aletheia. August Baker: Aletheia. It's more though the individual as opposed to the individual with someone else and in fact, there's a lot of suspicion about das Mann. Have you thought about that? Because when you talk about uncovering or clearing away or opening up a clearing space, it seems like it has some resonances with the psychoanalytic treatment. Dr. John Mills: Oh, absolutely. I certainly am an admirer of Heidegger's work, not his personhood, and having written on Being and Time in a few of my publications, the notion his turn to the truth of being is really a return to the ancient notion of disclosedness or unconcealment. Of course, that's exactly what we're doing in the consulting room. We're looking for things that are hidden, but yet have always been present. We're trying to open up spacings in the psyche that provide a porthole to other unconscious realms. At the same time, there's always going to be a concealing or a covering over when there's a new opening and that's the dialectical nature of the psyche. August Baker: Right. Yeah. There's sort of a suspicion of systematic theory in Heidegger. Well, as soon as it gets built up, you might need to tear it down again. That's my sense. Dr. John Mills: Well, it depends, yeah, how you want to look at it. It's interesting that Heidegger had disparaged in comments to say about psychoanalysis when he seems to have been engaging in his own existential psychoanalytic philosophy. [inaudible 00:20:43] is basically the human being who exists as a self, lives in proximity to others, and within a communal world and within the cosmos itself, and we have a relationship to all these different aspects. Yet there's those hidden elements, those unconscious elements, that are in Heidegger's philosophy, he just doesn't bring it out that way. August Baker: Right. Yeah, I was just reading this, but he does say we don't really want to look at the reflecting eye because the nature of the human may be that that's precisely not who the subject is. The subject might be instead the other, the das Mann, or the They. It's almost like he, but it did seem very similar to me. Dr. John Mills: Well, yeah. Well, das Mann would be, or the They comportment would be an inauthentic one, but it's one in which we all live in every day. We have to go through both, again, it's a dialectical kind of sojourn through both authentic and inauthentic states, and it's just part of the human trajectory. If we can come together with pulling these things into more of a unification, I would say that that is probably more helpful for a person to integrate different aspects of themselves. August Baker: Now, I know you've talked about how the unconscious is so important in psychoanalysis, and sometimes it seems like it's been left behind, although one of the articles in this volume that by Sopher and Kuchuck is pretty helpful about incorporating it back in. But I was wondering about the death drive. It seems to be still completely absent from relational psychoanalysis. Let me read, just, here's a quote from you in this book. "Unless one is a misanthrope, disturbed, traumatized, or deranged, all people deep down want to be happy, experience peace, to flourish and prosper, to beget or create, to have a family or be a part of what a family signifies, love, acceptance, empathy, validation, recognition. Then contrast that with Freud civilization and its discontents. Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved. Your neighbor tempts you to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him." What has happened to that? Dr. John Mills: Well, these are two polarities. I think one is grounded in our natural desires, it's grounded in embodiment. It's actually comical that anyone would want to deny the reality of the life within that revolves around Freud's two primary drives, whether it be sex or eros, or whether it be aggression and death. These are central aspects to who we are that gets played out in different modes, different manners. On one hand, of course, this is the edifice of his turn in Beyond the Pleasure Principle where death becomes the impetus for life and it's about an integration of the two polarities in the psyche that are simultaneously striving for their own expression. Then when you impose on there, what you really want is to have it all, have your cake and eat it to too, but we would prefer to have these conflicting wishes met in circuitous ways or through compromise formations. I don't think anybody, well, again, anyone who is being genuine and honest is going to negate that they don't have these aggressive inclinations in them. We all do, just they come out in different forms, and particularly they can come out in relational, what we see all the time, they come out relationally due to the degree that we call them relational aggressions or microaggressions now. But this is again, the way that the dialectic flows. This is the way the dasein will meander through the various modes of authenticity and inauthenticity, getting back to Heidegger. What's the central thesis of Heidegger? Well, he says, do the essence of dasein on one hand is care, it's concernful solicitude, if not love for others, and on the other hand, it is fraught with anxiety and it's terrified of death. Death, anxiety is a driving force. He has his own little dialectic going on. But I do think in the end that we're all trying to fumble toward ecstasy, so to speak, and hope that we arrive on some kind of relational docket. Because I'm doing clinical work for 25 years, you know all too well, people who suffer from isolation, loneliness, solitude, their own aggressions that they cut off opportunities for interpersonal connection and intimacy. August Baker: But is there a sense that ... We look out there and we see a lot of people who don't seem to want to experience peace, well, or love, acceptance, sympathy, validation, recognition. Maybe within a certain group they do, but not on a grand scale. I'm wondering if there's a sense in relational psychoanalysis that that person has been traumatized or that person is disturbed, or that is some sort of injury that needs to be corrected, and I'm not sure why that follows. Dr. John Mills: Yeah, I would agree with you that I think that the shifting away from, it's not really about innate drives, that's creating these inter psychic conflicts that due to frustrated wish fulfillment, but it really has to do with our relationship to other people and that's the emphasis, that's the primacy of relatedness that they want to put on things. On the other hand, it doesn't negate the fact that we could have both of these proclivities that are operative at once in the psyche, and some people develop more of a one sidedness, and they haven't been able to find that balance between their internal desires and conflicts. The other thought is people have the need to have enemies. August Baker: Right. Yeah, you said that. I thought that was a good point. Yeah, it's exhilarating. One of the things you talked about what is exclusively relational, and there was a survey of, I guess, what people, relational psychoanalysts consciously emphasized, so we get non-a authoritarian, deep listening, and immersion, courageous honest speech. Then in fact, the study did arrive at one broad category, love. I'm thinking Winnicott, Hate and the Countertransference, it's somehow just such a refreshing thing to read because it's, I guess, normalizing. I just wonder, that itself seems to be also contrary maybe to the more classical view, which was hate is natural and we can't take people for what they say they're doing. We don't really know. Dr. John Mills: Well, I would think that my relational colleagues would agree with that. I would imagine the way the analytic environment is set up is to irritate the transference, and that's going to bring out all these negative things, everything from one's developmental traumas to their deprivations, their lack, the abuses that they've either had in fantasy or reality, and they project it onto the analyst. Over time this is what happens. I would imagine if they're like myself, even if you operate relationally, you're still having to deal with people's hostilities. August Baker: Right. Also, I think the thing about Winnicott is he says he shows his hate by the end of the hour. Maybe that's just too strong a word for people to use now, the word hate, but there's also hate and frustration on the analyst's side. Dr. John Mills: Yes. August Baker: Isn't that more emphasized in the classical literature and kind of deemphasize now? Dr. John Mills: Well, again, I don't keep up on every writing that's taking place in relational journals, but I don't know. I think there's a great deal of writing about enactments and countertransference. August Baker: True, true, true. Right. Dr. John Mills: Impasses and- August Baker: Yes, that's certainly true, right. I thought a very interesting chapter in the book by someone named Merav Roth who talked about declining view, and I wasn't really sure what your thoughts were on that. Is the concept of projective identification something that you work with or that is helpful to you? Dr. John Mills: Oh, very much. One of my early books is called Treating Attachment Pathology, and I definitely find the concept and the function of projective identification be extremely useful, particularly clinically, maybe not so much as a developmental theory that Klein would adopt, but if you look at projective identification from the standpoint that Klein was seeing this extremely disturbed kids, what we would call attachment disordered or disorganized attachment styles today, that kind of could make sense. But to take a developmental concept from infancy and then retrofit it to the adult world is problematic. But anybody who works clinically is going to be floating in their own counter transferences around whose projection is it? Unconsciously, I'm identifying with something that I can't even identify in myself. It's overwhelmed me emotionally or cognitively that I don't know how to deal with in the moment and then only by processing it later, you realize that the patient was evacuating this nasty stuff into me, and I was absorbing it and I very much think that the projective identification is a terrific concept to use, particularly around clinical theory. I used it in supervision. It's just invaluable. August Baker: Yeah, and I thought that was an excellent article. Some of the critics are making very good ... Or you learn a lot from reading their pieces. I guess we only have time for one more question. Karen Morda said that the often heated responses by his critics reveal both intellectual differences and personal fronts. I recognize that you've won awards and a lot of recognition for your work in this area, but it seems like, as I was reading it, I kept thinking there must have been some pretty dark times in the beginning when you were getting so much criticism. I can't imagine there weren't. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or how you got through that. Dr. John Mills: Well, yeah, that was a rough time. In a nutshell, I kind of got alienated and excommunicated from certain circles, and then I also had been befriended by many, many senior people in the field that went on to help me and build my career so if anything, it was just a, I suppose, an inevitability that I would create enemies and then meet new friends. August Baker: Well, that's a good point. Yeah. Okay. Well, Dr. Mills, I really appreciate your talking with me today. It was a pleasure to read the book and very engaging. Thank you very much. Dr. John Mills: Well, thank you for your kind invitation. I appreciate it.

Amy Schwartz Cooney and Rachel Sopher

Vitalization in psychoanalysis: Perspectives on being and becoming

In Vitalization in Psychoanalysis, Schwartz Cooney and Sopher develop and explore the concept of vitalization, generating new ways of approaching and conceptualizing the psychoanalytic project.

Vitalization refers to the process between two people that ignites new experiences and brings withdrawn aspects of the self to life. This book focuses on how psychoanalysis can be a uniquely creative encounter that can aid this enlivening internal process, offering a vibrant new take on the psychotherapeutic project. There is a long tradition in psychoanalysis that addresses the ways that the unique subjectivities of each member of the therapeutic dyad contribute to the repetition of entrenched patterns of relating, and how the processing of enactments can be reparative. But this overlap in subjectivities can also bring to life undeveloped experiences. This focus on generativity and progressive action represents a significant, cutting-edge turn in psychoanalysis. Vitalization in Psychoanalysis represents a deep meditation on this transformational moment in the history of psychoanalytic thought.

Pulling together work from major writers on vitalization from all the main psychoanalytic schools of thought, and covering development, theory and clinical practice, this book will be an invaluable guide for clinicians of all backgrounds, as well of students of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

Table of Contents 1. Vitalizing Enactment: A Relational Exploration 2. An Allegiance to Absence: Fidelity to the Internal Void 3. Activating life in the analytic encounter: the ground of being in psychoanalysis 4. The Generative Unconscious and the Capacity to be Fully Alive 5. Between Mythos and Logos: Surrender, Vitalization and Transformation 6. Vitalizing Engagement: the Generative Transformation of the Project of Psychoanalysis 7. Reawakening Desire: Shame, Analytic Love, and Psychoanalytic Imagination 8. Moving from within the Maternal: The Choreography of Analytic Eroticism 9. Vitalization as a Case-Specific Emergent Process 10. Vitality, Attunement and the Lack Thereof 11. The Analyst As Catalyst: Cultivating Mind In The Shadow Of Neglect 12. What Makes Time Fly? Loewald's Concept of Time and the Resuscitation of Vitality

... Editor(s) Biography Amy Schwartz Cooney, Ph.D., is on faculty at the New York University (NYU) Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She is on the Board of Directors and is faculty/supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) and at the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. She is Joint Editor in Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and is in private practice in New York City.

Rachel Sopher is Board Director, Faculty and Supervisor, National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) Training Institute; Faculty and Supervisor, National Training Program for NIP; and Faculty, Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. She is Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and maintains a private practice in New York City.

Reviews "To live or to exist in less than aliveness or deadness. Such is the profound question at the heart of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and treatment and this expertly curated volume brings together the leading writers on the vitalizing possibilities that inhere in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. We encounter patients dominated by states of non-aliveness, absence, dysregulation, trauma and neglect; and clinicians who utilize elements of their own presence, reverie, countertransference and shere courage to facilitate, kindle and ignite life, libido and vitality. Reading this book is an exercise in parallel process: each unique chapter will itself inspire, enliven and vitalize the reader; and will help all clinicians as we struggle with our most difficult and challenging patients." -Robert Grossmark, Ph.D., teaches and supervises at NYU Postdoctoral Program, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies, The Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society

"Since the Winnicottian and Bionian ontological revolution in psychoanalysis, analysts have been more focused on helping our patients 'to be' than 'to know.' As Winnicott outlined what allows a person to develop a capacity to be, we began to understand more about ways that we are also not allowed to be. A focus on deficits in symbolization, parental absence and deadness have now led to an increasing interest in experiences and metaphors of vitalization. This volume is a gift in helping us to understand how profoundly stark life can 'be' without a sense of aliveness. A talented collection of analysts from the Independent, Kleinian, and Relational traditions contribute to our understanding of this crucial concept in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. These essays probe intersubjective processes of how vitalizing processes emerge, are enacted, and integrated. There is also a keen interest in the kind of object the analyst is becoming in the analytic process, one who can find new parts of the patient's inner life and play. Schwartz Cooney and Sopher's volume embodies how analytic concepts such as deadness continue to evolve as key analytic writers bring to the matter their own struggles with finding vitality inside their patients and aliveness within the analytic process." - Steven Cooper, Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School and Chief Editor Emeritus at Psychoanalytic Dialogues

"This is a rich and absorbing book, full of original descriptions of the void and its place in psychopathology. There seem to be myriad ways of arriving at empty states, but even more interestingly, a variety of routes out of them. The clinical accounts are very moving, and read like chapters out of a terrific novel: there is endless patience, endurance, stamina, terrible boredom, suspense and real excitement for patients and analysts alike. Read and enjoy." - Anne Alvarez, Ph.D., M.A.C.P, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and teacher and retired Co-Convener of the Autism Service, Child and Family Dep't. Tavistock Clinic, London

"This important volume highlights some of the most essential aspects of human existence: enlivenment, desire, generativity and hope. In highly creative and sophisticated ways, it brings to life critical ideas on therapeutic action, transformation, the capacity for a full existence and the role of psychoanalysis in reviving vitalization." - Dr. Galit Atlas, faculty member in the postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis at New York University and author of The Enigma of Desire

Transcription: August Baker: Welcome to New Books and Psychoanalysis. I'm August Baker, your host today. Today we are talking about a theoretical book and one that, when I read it, really affected me emotionally to tell you the truth. I kind of read it with a lump in my throat and I talked to someone else who had the same reaction. So it's a pretty special book. It's called Vitalization in Psychoanalysis: Perspectives on Being and Becoming, 2021. I'd like to just mention a couple of reviews before I welcome our guests. Anne Alvarez reviewing the books said, "The clinical accounts are very moving and read like chapters out of a terrific novel. There is endless patience, endurance, stamina, terrible boredom, suspense and real excitement for patients and analysts alike." Steven Cooper, kind of sketching the history of psychoanalytic thought, says "[inaudible 00:01:13] is the kind of cutting edge right now," and he kind of traces a movement, starting with an older focus in psychoanalysis on interpretation and knowledge and then coming to Winnicott and [inaudible 00:01:27] and eventually to a focus on deficits and symbolization, and now this current work on experiences and metaphors of vitalization. So our two guests, Dr. Amy Schwartz Cooney, has a private practice, teaches, writes, supervises and is joint editor in chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Welcome, Amy. Amy Schwartz Cooney: Thank you. August Baker: Rachel Sopher also has a private practice teaches, writes, supervises and is editor in chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Welcome, Rachel. Rachel Sopher: Thank you. August Baker: So the book is Vitalization in Psychoanalysis and I imagine some of our listeners, all of our listeners, have heard the term psychoanalysis and probably each of them has their own associations to it. What are we meaning by psychoanalysis in this context? Amy Schwartz Cooney: Rachel, do you want to start? Rachel Sopher: Oh, sure. That's such a good question and there's so many different definitions of what psychoanalysis means and it's changed so much over the years since the beginning with Freud. Right now, to me what psychoanalysis means is it's a way of thinking, it's a way of framing interactions between patient and their analyst and so for me, it's just a state of mind and a way of thinking. What about you, Amy? What do you think? Amy Schwartz Cooney: I agree with that and I think that it's a project that I regard to be about growth and transformation. It's an intense emotional process and because we are both a relational psychoanalyst, I think I can speak for both of us to say that we do really feel that the centrality of the relationship in the room within the patient between their real others, fantasy others, past, present is at the heart of what is transformative and mutative about psychoanalysis. Rachel Sopher: Absolutely. August Baker: Just before we started talking, I mentioned to Rachel that I had benefited from reading an article she wrote about relational psychoanalysis with Steven Kuchuk, and you say that there might be some misunderstanding that relational psychoanalysis is more here and now secondary process material and that it's not really dealing with the unconscious and you're saying that's kind of a mischaracterization. Rachel Sopher: Yeah, I think it's kind of a straw man argument that people use to discredit the relational perspective, relational outlook on psychoanalysis. It doesn't take away anything. There's nothing lost in this perspective of looking at the interaction between the two and that being the way that things change, the transformative point, is between the couple, patient-therapist couple. It includes everything and includes unconscious communication and includes the bodily physical sensations and referee and dreams and all of that. August Baker: So the analyst being more willing to be personally involved and to work with their subjective reactions? Amy Schwartz Cooney: Well, to acknowledge that they are personally involved and that they are subjective. So relational psychoanalysis just historically evolved as a critique of the classical model and the notion of neutrality and abstinence with an acceptance of the inevitability of the analyst's participation, conscious and unconscious. I think in these contrast between classical and relational, like Rachel was saying, that there can be these reductive straw dogs. Yes, it's true. I think that relational psychoanalysis maybe runs the risk of being too based in the here and now and too much about the mutual process in the here and now, whereas the classical model runs the risk perhaps of being too much about solely the interpsychic world of the patient, but actually I think relational analysis comprises both and probably as does the contemporary Freudian perspective. We just happen not to be as immersed in that position. August Baker: Right. Okay. That actually was my next question. I just wondered about your own background and what has led to vitalization. Are there particular theorists who have been particularly important for both of you in leading to these ideas? Amy Schwartz Cooney: Well, for one, I would say that our conversations, Rachel and I are good friends and colleagues and for whatever reasons we have connected around a real interest what psychoanalysis is in terms of the question of past, present, damage and repair versus creation and emergence. It's just something that she and I found ourselves both talking about a lot. I think that I can say that both of us have kind of an object relational orientation, meaning that we're very interested in the way people take in their relationships and live them out. The idea of vitalization really came out of largely this very vitalizing, exciting relationship that I think that we've created together. On a kind of specific level for me in a study group that I was in, I started to read Anne Alvarez, and while she comes from a totally different place theoretically in that she's really a contemporary Kleinian who's integrated beyond and regulation theory and so forth and works with children, her work is incredibly progressive and hopeful and geared towards the future even with patients who have been regarded as the most hopeless and inaccessible. That's where I kind of hooked into the idea, but it was really in conversation with Rachel that this all got exciting and [inaudible 00:08:25] to be. August Baker: Great. Rachel, do you have any other ... Rachel Sopher: No, I would just totally agree with what Amy said. I remember we had known each other just over email first, back and forth. When we met in person, I remember our conversation felt alive right away. Our first conversation was about Anne Alvarez. I don't know if you remember that, Amy, and it was just so exciting to meet someone who I felt so aligned with and was so excited by the same ideas. Anne Alvarez is very inspiring in that she does look towards what can be created. There is this kind of hopeful energy to the writing and to her clinical examples that give you hope for something new, that something new could and can be created between two people. That was so enlivening to talk to Amy about that, and I would say my other influences is I have an object relational tilt. I would consider myself a relational analyst. I love Winnicott, Beyond, Thomas Ogden, the goodies, the classic people. August Baker: In terms of how you would define vitalization now, we can give a definition. I thought actually it was quite beautiful in your introduction. You were writing it in March of 2020, which was very significant time for all of us, and you wrote about being in that time but also seeing the springtime in the park. I thought that was a beautiful metaphor for what vitalization might be. But please Amy, correct me if I'm wrong or do you have a working definition of vitalization? Amy Schwartz Cooney: Well, I was writing that vitalizing enactment, so I was trying to sort of reimagine an idea that's very core to relational psychoanalysis and really many different schools right now, which is this idea of analyst and patient meeting unconsciously in ways that are either disassociated or repetitive but are understood to be pathological and that enactments are meaningful in so far as they can be worked through, survived and processed. My idea was that enactments, the coming together of two minds unconsciously, can also be propulsive and can bring unlived experiences or nascent experiences. That's my particular spin on the idea and my particular interest was thinking about the way that we not only repair the old, but actually come together and create things that are new for both people in the diad, for the analyst and the patient. August Baker: So true. Yeah, I get this. There's one point you talk about uncovering and mourning the old versus creating and generating the new. Another was archeology as an older way of looking at it or repairing and now we're talking about bringing something to life. I said a little bit in the beginning about Steven Cooper's view of how this was the cutting edge. Either one of you, can you talk to the audience a bit about how this is the cutting edge or how it fits into the past? Rachel Sopher: I guess I could just start out, experientially I've been finding more ... in my work that I've been finding more patients who are struggling with deadened experiences inside or pockets of deadness inside. I don't know that it's been addressed in a systematic way by psychoanalysis. So first of all, just in terms of the content, I think that that is something new, but I think also with relational psychoanalysis and the relational turn, we call it, there's opportunities for more. There's opportunities for more than just the archeological model of uncovering the old. There's something new and alive that is created between two people. So there's opportunities for so much more that can be created, generated and like Amy said, it's something new for both patient and analyst. Amy Schwartz Cooney: I would say that bothness is part or is inherent to what is mutative. Just to extend a bit and address what Steven Cooper I think was talking about is this kind of question or this place that the field is at right now, which is thinking about or querying the relationship between interpretation, symbolization and nonrepresentational, non symbolized action in the field and kind of unconscious action, things that occur that aren't about interpreting the truth of the patient's past experience but creating something unbidden, as Danielle Stern would say, new and emergent through the relational field. I think that Steven was kind of getting at that movement in the field from interpretation to relationship and even just querying that question about interpretation, representation, symbolization. August Baker: Right. I picked that up a lot and I think my impression is there are a lot of people who think that psychoanalysis means learning something about, "Oh this was my childhood and now I'm this way because of this happened in my childhood." I think you're saying that's really not a fair characterization of what is going on. Amy, if we could talk about ... you have a case study of Joel and you have this term vitalizing enactment, which you already introduced. I wondered if you could also back up some and tell us about what an enactment is. Amy Schwartz Cooney: The notion of enactment sort of is related to this idea that we were talking about earlier, about analyst and patient each bringing unconscious aspects of self into the room and into the relationship, and an enactment in its most basic way is this meeting of unconsciousnesses but in ways that have frequently been construed as repetitive of old problematic patterns or dissociated traumatic experience. So an enactment, that term means something that occurs, like an acting in actually as opposed to acting out, rather than a talking out, thinking out, interpreting it out. It's an event and usually it's kind of a seismic event where all of a sudden somebody says or does something or there's a feeling that had never been there before or suddenly your patient is angry at you and you had no idea what you were stumbling into or heard or in love. Or something big occurs that one or both had no idea was coming, and then we have frequently thought if we can just make it through without destroying the entire treatment, we can make sense of this and make use of it generally through interpretation and symbolization and move on. An enactment is sort of an unconscious collision. August Baker: Then a vitalizing enactment as opposed to a regular old enactment? Amy Schwartz Cooney: Yeah. Well, big E enactment as Anthony Bass made these distinction between a big E enactment, which is that huge collision and a small E, which is just sort of the day to day bumping against one another- August Baker: Sure. Is an enactment something that the analyst does or something that the patient [inaudible 00:17:08]? Amy Schwartz Cooney: It's something that happens in the relationship and it's frequently thought that it's initiated by the patient, but it can be initiated by the analyst as well. That's a very relational idea that the analyst is bringing their own unconscious in all its complexities into the room and can actually be driving a process at times without knowing it. August Baker: Okay, I understand. So the old model was you're just using interpretation. That was the 1950s model, right? Amy Schwartz Cooney: Well, that's the high water mark, that the analyst is mature enough and trained enough and expert enough that they can discern like a surgeon the truth of the patient's experience. They can interpret that to the patient and that will make the unconscious conscious and therefore resolve conflict and resolve psychopathology. August Baker: That's a high water mark also because some patients aren't able to do that or that's not the way they're going to work in the analysis. Is that right? Amy Schwartz Cooney: Yeah, and most people just don't think that way anymore. Don't think that there is a single truth, don't see the analyst ... don't see therapeutic action as just around interpretation. Even the contemporary Freudians don't. August Baker: Okay, but I interrupted you. Again, so revitalizing enactment as opposed to a regular one. Sorry to interrupt in that. Amy Schwartz Cooney: Enactments are generally considered to be both ubiquitous and potentially dangerous and destructive because they come from these areas of pathological repetition or dissociated trauma. My thought, and this is related to what Alvarez was talking about, is that we also meet in areas that are part of the unconscious that isn't just shards of painful trauma, but are pieces of ourselves that we have not yet had the chance to fully bring to life, and that sometimes patient and analyst meet in areas that are embryonic for both of them. There's something about the meeting that can be vitalizing in that it brings a new experience to life both in the process of the treatment and within and between both partners. August Baker: Your case study of Joel was just really powerful, I must say. We don't have time to go through the whole thing, but there were a couple of ... just to drop in a couple of quotes you said in there, one I found very interesting was that you did a vital vitalizing enactment and are reaching out to him. It was very powerful and afterwards you were thinking, "I don't know what that did. Maybe nothing. Maybe something big. Maybe ..." But I found it very interesting, here's a quote. It made a big change and eventually one of the things that happened was he was talking about ... the patient, Joel, was talking about how he liked basketball and he told you the story of a Knicks game, of a player who wasn't usually playing and came in and did great and the team won and you said, "I was taken with his recounting of the Knicks game, this story of redemption and hope, succeeding against all logs and coming to life when least expected. Although I had many clever connections to make, I said only, "How amazing, how great." I just thought that was very interesting and it's an example of this not necessarily having to put it into words. Amy Schwartz Cooney: Yeah, and even feeling, and particularly with this patient, that words could stop things, could actually deaden things and that what was so extraordinary about that moment or that session was his aliveness. It didn't really matter what we were talking about, although obviously this game itself was such a hope, was such a wish and such a lovely metaphor for who he might be, but I think for many analysts when they question is this psychoanalytic or not, that it's really like the valance or affect, what's happening in the room rather than the content exactly that feels so important. It's like sometimes the valance can be all around the past. It's not like the past is insignificant at all, but it's just ... I think what Rachel and I were trying to think about other aspects of mutative action that are more forward moving and not necessarily that old equation linking past to present and the causal thing. I just knew with this patient that something novel was happening and were I to go back to those sort of traditional, restrained interpretations that I was taught to make in my own training, I felt that it would deaden it, that it would stop something quite wonderful that was happening. August Baker: Yeah. I could feel that it was enlivening for him, that it was great to be able to share that. Rachel Sopher: Can I just add something? August Baker: Yeah, sure. Rachel Sopher: Because I totally agree with everything that Amy's saying. I think we have these choice points as clinicians where we can either choose to go into the repetitive old pattern and make connections that way, which can be extremely useful, or to invite the patient into something new and the invitation into something new is not just a new part of themselves, it's an invitation into a new way of relating with us and it's an invitation for us to also step into that with them. I think that that's really part of the meaningful part of this kind of vitalizing enactment is exactly that moment. I mean, I don't know if you agree, Amy. Amy Schwartz Cooney: I totally agree and thank you. I think that was a really important clarification of what our process is and what the choices are that we're constantly sifting through. August Baker: You had this notion of countertransference urgency. Could you explain that a little bit? Amy Schwartz Cooney: Yeah, I actually took that phrasing from Anne Alvarez because when she talked about this patient, Robbie, this autistic, unreachable boy who was slipping away from her before a break, it was like this heartbreaking vignette in her book. She said that she reached out to him out of countertransference urgency and looked him right in the face and was like, "Robbie, Robbie come back to me." I was so struck with the parallel of my experience where I felt like I can't let this guy go and just drift away into his nether zone, and in part because it stirred up something in me that, as I said, related to my own history and what it's like to watch a parent disappear. August Baker: That was very profound and I also had the sense reading your case study that he may have been pushing in a way, that you got to this point where you were really frustrated and you were unable to reach him and he may have been pushing it there to that point where you were ... that was just my take on it. I don't know if you felt that. It's something that both people create. Amy Schwartz Cooney: I totally agree with you and I think that there came a point, I kind of called it the tipping point, where it became unsustainable and I think that he was unconsciously pushing me and trying to ... one of the things that we say in psychoanalysis is sort of the patient teaches you how to be their analyst. I think that in some way he was doing that. He just kept saying, "No, not that way, not that way, not that way, not that way," until something new emerged. Rachel, do you have that sense also that sometimes in change moments that the patient is in a way leading you? Rachel Sopher: Oh, absolutely. It's almost uncanny the way that ... when you look backwards, when the enactment happens and you look backwards at where you've been, you can kind of see the progress of that, the progression of that towards that moment where I think there are these little subtle changes or subtle little enactments, like you said, that happen on the way that lead to this kind of transformative moment. August Baker: I remember hearing Andrea Celenza talk about ... she had this patient where he got to the point where he was ... I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was very threatening and she said that she often tells people about this patient and people say, "Well, of course you got to that. He was threatening you because he was communicating such and such," and that's understandable. Her response was, "They missed the point. He had to get me to the point where I was rattled." Rachel Sopher: Exactly. You know what Winnicott calls these? He says you have to live an experience together. What Winnicott actually says is the mother and baby live and experience together and I think that's what we do as well. We have to live through it with the patient in order to ... that's the emotional hook. There has to be some kind of energy behind it, some kind of passion or affect behind it that drives the movement of the therapy forward. August Baker: I also keep imagining when I read about these things that the patient finds something new. I know you mentioned this in the book, I couldn't find the quote, but the patient finds something new or feels, "Geez, I'm alive in a new way now," that's also very painful when you think about what you've lost. It's not an all pleasant thing. It's actually pretty painful. Go ahead. Amy Schwartz Cooney: I think feeling alive isn't just feeling happy, it's feeling. I don't know who said this, but it was sometime during the pandemic when, I don't know, I was reading something or watching something and it was about what is the purpose of life? The purpose of life is to live it, not to hide in your room and not to feel nothing. It's to feel the joy, the sorrow, the pain, the yearning, the disappointment. That's all vital. August Baker: I'll go back to Celenza again, I think says that people tend to think as you get older you get more dead and she's totally against that as it is not true. In a way that's another way ... I don't think this is so pathologizing because you're talking about people who can get this way just by living, can become numb just by living or not because anything in particular happened wrong. Amy Schwartz Cooney: I think in your case that you were really grappling with very deadened parts of the patient. Rachel Sopher: Yes, absolutely. You're right that it doesn't have to be that something has gone wrong, but that we could get just numb to experience and then we have to ... first we have to realize it and recognize it. I think that that's a big part of the challenge is recognizing the places where we're numb because we can sleepwalk through life feeling like everything is fine, but really be avoiding certain kinds of experiences that bring up painful emotion, so then we're narrowing our lives down further and further and further without even realizing it. I think that's so helpful about analysis is that you start to see the place that ... what's really missing and the ways that you've kept yourself small and then missed out on the whole range of experience. August Baker: Right. Rachel, it's the same with your case of Jenny. It was really moving. I'd like to hear you tell the audience some about this concept of allegiance to absence. I also wanted to just read one of the things that struck me so much. Now, you, "Imagining with great clarity an image of Jenny and me sitting together in my office, an inert body laid out between us, gray corpse like. It rested on a block with intravenous IV tubes coming out of each of its arms. One of the IVs ran from the prostate body to Jenny's arm and the other to mine, each of us connected to this lifeless mass, infusing it with our own blood, each of us feeding it, sustaining it, keeping it on life support in some limbo state between life and death." What a powerful image. Amy Schwartz Cooney: Beautiful. Rachel Sopher: It was a very powerful image. August Baker: For you, I imagine. Rachel Sopher: Yeah, it really was. Quite impactful. I guess I'll start with allegiance to absence [inaudible 00:31:15] the case. It's this idea that not only do we have these kinds of deadened or absent places inside, but that we can be attached to them. Let's say we have a neglectful or absent parent, that's an attachment. There's an attachment to an absence. There can be defenses against letting go that. You would think that if there's something absent or missing or deadened inside, that you would just want to get rid of it. But that can bring up a lot of fear and like you said, it can bring up a lot of mourning and grief for what's been missed out on. There's this allegiance to the absence. There's a holding on, an attachment to the absence, even if it is kind of a bad object, it carries some effective resonance for the patient. So that's that idea. I think that image was so powerful because what it told me was that both my patient Jenny and I were both committed to keeping this absence alive between us, this deadened object alive between us. We were both putting all of our energy, this life blood, into this because she was so committed to therapy, I was so committed to her, and yet there was something so dead between us. So this really brought to light the way we were both in an ongoing enactment of keeping things dead between us, not allowing things to get too lively or too exciting between us. So this really brought to light the way that I had been participating it in it as well and that freed me actually. Once I realized it, I was scared of something alive happening between us too. I couldn't analyze that myself and realize where that came from in myself and then free myself to be more alive with Jenny. August Baker: Again, in your case also, you could see the mutual dance. She actually has a panic attack, it sounded like, or something like that in the session, which is going to really put you at the edge now. This is a volume, of course, and I think one of the things we haven't touched on is that you have your feelers out there for what's happening with the other schools of thought in psychoanalysis and this is a volume that's kind of ... I guess as I understand it, you've seen movements towards vitalization in lots of different schools and this volume is trying to collect all of them together. Could you speak to that and say something about what the different schools are that are represented? Amy Schwartz Cooney: Relational psychoanalysis is a huge umbrella at this point. Relational psychoanalysis started 40 years ago with Steven Mitchell in Greenberg and really started with this idea of the critique of the classical model of the analyst is neutral and so forth, and put forth the centrality of relationships with real people with our internal objects. Since then, it has evolved so much and become an umbrella of schools or thought only united in terms of a belief in the centrality of relationships. This particular collection was really calling from many, many different lines of thought that I feel all fall within the rubric of relational psychoanalysis. Were we to do the book, a second book, for example, I think it would be really interesting to go to a Jungian and to go to a contemporary Freudian to elicit other voices that didn't come in, but these are all voices that I think fall within the broad umbrella of Big R relational psychoanalysis. Would you agree, Rachel? Rachel Sopher: I would. I think that that's exactly how I feel about it. I think our intention was really to bring into dialogue different voices from different backgrounds I think mostly within the relational scope. There is such a wide variation under the relational umbrella that it makes for a really interesting kind of dialogue in my opinion. August Baker: Right. No, I felt that also. I guess running out of our 45 minute hour, I go back to your writing this introduction in March of 2020. Do you have any thoughts generally about vitalization and this unprecedented time that we're going through? Amy Schwartz Cooney: A couple of thoughts. One, certainly that there's a need for it. I was saying earlier that people have responded to the volume I think in terms of gravitating towards the hope for hope. I think that it is a moment where we really do ... what is the Leonard Cohen ... the crack is where the light comes in there, where we're really hoping for the light and hoping for something new and different. I think it's really relevant to going on and living, not repeating and going back and trying to be the analyst that you were or the anything that you were before. I think life has changed seismically, not just because of COVID but I think obviously because of George Floyd and race and the white awakening long overdue, which has also, needless to say, become part of the psychoanalytic conversation. One of the things that I'm thinking a lot about is how to translate these ideas around vitalization, which are so deeply individual into a broader conversation around cultural identity and subjectivity and race and difference. I think it's relevant. I haven't yet formulated that, but that's the direction that I want to go next. Rachel? August Baker: Great. Rachel Sopher: I agree completely. I think that's so very important. I think over the past couple of years we've been fighting to stay alive physically and psychically. I mean, I think especially psychically, I mean, in my experience it's been hard to stay alive to what's happening because it's been so chaotic, so difficult, so filled with grief. I really feel like vitalization is a very important emergent topic right now in the midst of all of that. I think it's also important in the midst of this time when we have to fight to be in relationship with each other, to feel our connections that felt taken for granted before this and now we have to actually intentionally reach out to people and make plans and see each other over Zoom. It can be harder to feel those alive connections with one another, so I think we have to do that much more to stay alive right now. August Baker: Also politically, it just seemed that it was taken for granted that there was a mutual ... Amy Schwartz Cooney: Absolutely. August Baker: Or in retrospect, it seems like there was a mutual respect and now there's like, "No, we don't care about ... we're fine with just not talking." Amy Schwartz Cooney: Isn't it so disheartening? It really is. August Baker: Yeah. Well, unfortunately we're out of time, but I really appreciate you guys, y'all, talking with me today. Thank you so much. Rachel Sopher: It's been such a pleasure. Thank you. Amy Schwartz Cooney: Yeah. It's been vitalizing. It really is and we both so appreciate your interest in the book and in these ideas. The book brings us joy and also makes it feel alive because in the midst of all the horror and trauma, sometimes you can feel like these ideas are so meaningless, so we really appreciate it. August Baker: Yeah, it was amazing. I was just sort of, "Here's a book. Okay, I'll read it," and then it really affected me very strongly, so thank you.