Did Aldous Huxley invent the history of emotions? Sort of, yes

Posted on March 14, 2019 by

I’m researching a book about Aldous Huxley and his friends Alan Watts, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard, and how these four posh Brits moved to California and helped to invent the modern culture of ‘spiritual but not religious’.

Of the four, Huxley is my favourite. My last book, The Art of Losing Control, owes him a profound debt. Writing a biography of someone is a bit like moving in with them – you start to notice all their annoying habits. Huxley definitely has some but, having now read pretty much everything he’s written, I can still say he’s a truly great thinker.

I think his greatest claim to fame is his analysis of humans’ urge to self-transcendence. I’ve read a lot of people on this topic – William James, Ken Wilber, Emile Durkheim, the great mystics. Huxley is the greatest analyst I know of this central domain of human experience.

He took from William James and his friend FWH Myers the idea that the conscious ego is just an island on top of a much larger ocean of human personality. There is also a ‘subliminal self’ which we carry around with us, which occasionally intervenes into our awareness. There’s all kinds of junk down there but – as Myers was the first to claim – there are also latent powers of healing and inspiration. At the deepest level, Myers suggested (and James and Huxley agreed), the not-self of the subliminal mind merges into the Atman, super-consciousness, Mind-at-large.

Huxley insisted – decades before Abraham Maslow – that humans have a ‘basic drive to self-transcendence’. We exist in our small, conditioned, utilitarian egos, cut off from our deeper selves, but it’s boring and claustrophobic in there, and we long for a holiday. Maybe the soul in us yearns to get out of the cocoon and unfold our wings.

Huxley’s genius was to appreciate all the different ways humans seek these holidays from the self: alcohol, drugs, dancing, art, reading, hobbies, sex, crowds, rallies, war. Having tried to cover this enormous terrain myself, I can tell you that no one else comes close in terms of having a bird’s eye view of the landscape. James, for example, only analysed ‘religious experiences’, which he defines as man’s solitary encounters with the divine. This is just a tiny corner of the field that Huxley covers – it doesn’t even take account of collective religious experiences, let alone all the transcendent experiences that humans have which don’t explicitly involve God.

Huxley also brought an acute historical analysis to the topic. He was an early pioneer of the history of the emotions, and the history of medicine – I could make a case that he actually invents the history of the emotions, with his essay on accidie in 1923 * . He suggested that, while humans have basic drives, such as the drive to self-transcendence, those drives take different forms depending on a person’s temperament, physique and culture.

He argued – and this was one of the principal themes of my book The Art of Losing Control – that mystical transcendence had been marginalized and pathologized in western culture, starting from around the Reformation. It became embarrassing and ridiculous to admit to the sorts of mystical experiences which were highly valued in medieval culture. ‘We keep them to ourselves for fear of being sent to the psychoanalyst’, he said.

Lacking in role models or institutions for genuine mystical transcendence, western culture instead offers us what Huxley called ‘ersatz spirituality’ – package holidays from the self, such as consumerism, gadget-idolatry, booze, casual sex, and nationalism, which Huxley thought was the dominant religion of the 19th and 20th centuries (it’s returned with a vengeance in the 21st century).

What’s the solution? Rather than preaching a return to Christian orthodoxy, as TS Eliot, WH Auden or CS Lewis did, Huxley beat out a new path, which has proved much more influential in western culture: learn spiritual practices from the world’s religious traditions, test them out using empirical psychology, and find the ones that work for you.

He outlined this approach in his 1946 anthology, The Perennial Philosophy. I’ve loved this book since I was a teenager (I still have the copy I stole from the school library). It first introduced me to the likes of Rumi, Traherne, Chuang Tzu, Hakuin and Meister Eckhart, and helped me realize how much the world’s wisdom traditions share. But now I can see its flaws.

This was a book born out of historical despair. Huxley had played a central role in the British anti-war movement, and then abruptly abandoned it in 1937 to move to the US, ending up living with his wife in a hut in the Mojave desert. He thought western civilization was heading for destruction, and that literally our only hope was for a handful of people to dedicate themselves to mysticism at the margins of the general awfulness, like the Essenes seeking gnosis in the desert.

The only hope was if the Perennial Philosophy became generally recognized and embraced by humanity. He insisted the world’s great mystics all agreed on all the core points. But this was an argument born more of political despair than calm scholarship. It over-emphasized the extent to which mystics of different traditions agreed. And it ended up ranking mystical experience – only emotionless encounters with a formless, imageless divine are ‘true mysticism’, while any encounters with the divine in a particular form are considered second-rate.

You can understand how this is important to Huxley’s political dreams (humans fight over particular forms of the divine, so it’s better if we all meet in the Clear Light). But it’s pretty outrageous for him, a new convert to mysticism with hardly any practical experience, to lay down the law as to what is or isn’t a genuine encounter with the divine. How the hell does he know?

There’s an obvious anti-Abrahamic and pro-Hindu/Buddhist bias in his vision. He hates any religions that are time-based (ie with a historical vision), and thinks Buddhism and Hinduism are more tolerant because they’re more focused on the ‘eternal now’. Odd to argue for Hindu tolerance at the precise moment millions of Hindus and Muslims were massacring each other during the Partition.

But in more practical terms, it’s a very lonely, intellectual and bookish sort of spirituality that he offers (that must be why it appealed to me). There’s no mention of the role of community, or elders, or collective rituals. Just the intellectual and his books in the desert. ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’.

And it’s a hard path. Huxley, in effect, says that the only possible route for humanity is straight up a sheer cliff face. Anyone can be a mystic, he says. You just need to be completely detached from all worldly things and totally focused on the divine. No biggie.

It turned out to be very difficult. He suffered several hard years of failure and self-disgust, during which he wrote Ape and Essence, his most horrible and despairing book. He admitted at the end of his life that he’d never had a mystical experience. God will not be rushed.

But by the 1950s, he’d relaxed, and moved into his mature spirituality. Rather than insisting on the sheer cliff face of ascetic mysticism as the only route to salvation, Huxley accepted there were lots of practices one could do here in this world to make yourself healthier and happier on your long, multi-life journey to enlightenment.

He understood more and more the importance of the body to well-being and realization, and was an early supporter of gestalt therapy, the Alexander technique and hatha yoga. He finally found a place for sex in his spirituality – Island includes elements of Tantric practice. He also found a new appreciation for ecstatic dance – notice the children in his utopia, Island, practice ecstatic dance to ease themselves of anxiety. This was a decade before Gabrielle Roth developed 5Rhythms at Esalen. It’s a pity we never got to hear his thoughts on Beatlemania – they were certainly into him, and put him on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s.

He was also a big fan of hypnosis, and taught himself to be a hypnotist (his friend Igor Stravinsky claimed Huxley was a healer, and had cured him of insomnia). And, of course, he discovered that psychedelics offered a short-cut to temporary ego-dissolution. Those were the only times he ever really got a glimpse of the divine – when he was high.

It was tremendously shocking that this great English man of letters should preach the chemical path to liberation. But Huxley quite rightly pointed out that humans have been using psycho-active plants for religious rituals for several millennia. Other spiritual exercises rely on alterations in body chemistry, such as chanting, fasting or flagellation. That an alteration in body-chemistry is the means to a spiritual experience doesn’t mean that experience is only bio-chemical.

In the last decade of his life, the disgusted prophet of the desert became an unlikely hit on American campuses, lecturing to thousands of students at a time on visionary experience and integral education. This is his second great claim-to-fame. He had a vision that universities could offer an integral education which avoided over-specialization and over-intellectualization, and which instead educated the whole person – their body, their subliminal mind, their intellect, their social and political self, their relationship to nature, and their higher consciousness.

That vision of education proved hugely popular with baby-boomers, and yet somehow – such is the inertia of the university system – it’s had very little impact on what universities offer in the sixty years since then. They still offer the same over-specialized and totally intellectual learning experiences to undergrads, alas. His vision was, however, a defining influence on alternative colleges like Esalen, the Garrison Institute, CIIS and Schumacher College.

Today, we are all Huxley’s children. The ‘spiritual but not religious’ demographic is the fastest growing in the US. Contemplation has enjoyed its biggest revival since the Reformation. We are all influenced by ‘empirical spirituality’ like the science of mindfulness. Most westerners say they’ve had a mystical experience. And the psychedelic renaissance that Huxley called for 60 years ago may finally be happening.

* As to Huxley inventing the history of the emotions – his 1923 essay on accidie was decades before Lucien Febvre’s 1941 article calling for a history of emotions. He also wrote a ‘History of Some Fashions in Love‘ in 1924. Huxley argued in Ends and Means (1937) that humans’ basic drives take different forms or ‘canals’ during different eras in history. His historical novel Grey Eminence (1941) analysed the history of western meditation, and drew heavily on Bremond’s Literary History of Religious Sentiments in France, which was a principle inspiration for Febvre as well – so it’s interesting to ponder whether Grey Eminence was a direct influence on Febvre’s idea. We know at least it was read and reviewed in the 1945 edition of Annals of Social History, which Febvre edited. Febvre and Huxley’s brother Julian later fell out over UNESCO’s grand ‘history of humanity’ project, but that’s another story. 

But it’s Huxley’s Devils of Loudun (1952) which to my mind is Huxley’s greatest work of history of the emotions. It’s fascinating in its historical analysis of possessions, witchcraft, and how changing attitudes altered how people perceived and experienced ecstatic phenomena. He notes, for example, that by the Victorian era possession by demons has more or less disappeared, while possession by dead souls became more common. And he notes that by the 20th century, people have started to report being possessed by machines, particularly radios. Devils also has an extraordinary footnote on the clystère or enema-pump as a medical procedure for melancholy and exorcisms, and how it entered the West’s pornographic imagination as a result. You can see it in the bottom-right of Durer’s famous engraving Melancholia, below. He also mentions a painting of a clystere procedure by Boucher, although I haven’t been able to identify this. 

Later in his career, Huxley wrote essays on the history of tension, and on the history of visionary experience and artistic culture (that essay, later published as Heaven and Hell, is unsurpassed as an analysis of the arts and ecstatic experience). He was uniquely well-placed to develop this sort of interdisciplinary endeavour, and was an early pioneer of the medical humanities, popping up to give historical and philosophical speeches at medical conferences in the 1950s and 1960s (his speech on the history of tension was given at a conference on tranquiizers). His ability to act as a ‘pontifex’ or bridge-builder between the sciences and humanities had a profound influence on psychedelic science – thanks to him, early researchers like Humphrey Osmond and Timothy Leary came to interpret psychedelics through the lens of mystical experience. 

Did Aldous Huxley invent the history of emotions? Many more traditional historians could lay a claim as well – Huizinga, Elias, Febvre, Norman Cohn. But Huxley deserves to be mentioned in the history of the history of emotions as well. 

Durer’s Melancholia, with the clystere in the bottom right corner

 

Euphoria: A Very Brief History

Posted on March 5, 2019 by and

Dr Christopher Milnes is an early career scholar and history tutor based in London.  His book ‘A History of Euphoria: The Perception and Misperception of Health and Well-Being’ was published with Routledge in January 2019.

 

The history of euphoria reflects a great deal about the human experience.  This is a word that has belonged both to health and to sickness and which has emerged at times of both sadness and joy.  It is also part of the history of ignorance and knowledge.  What I particularly like about euphoria, however, is its breadth of meanings as well as its capacity to sometimes mean nothing very much at all – or, at least, nothing that probably does not already have a much better, more widely known name perfectly suited to it.

In Ancient Greece, to perceive the quality of euphoros (εὔφορος) in a person or a thing was to recognise the ability of that person or that thing to bear or carry something well.  The root euphoros and the words that came from it combined the Greek for ‘well’ and ‘bearing’ – eu (εύ) and pherein (φέρω).  This ability to bear or carry well could be understood in a literal or a more abstract sense.  People who danced beautifully might be thought to carry the different parts of their bodies well.  Ships that safely carried their cargoes could also be judged in this way.  Things easy to carry or wear or manageable and light, qualities of richness and manliness, a ready tongue, an ease of ability.  Abundantly fertile animals and plants.  All could have euphoros.[i]

Had it not been for the emergence of Neo-Latin in the early modern period, it is unlikely euphoros words would have entered most European vernacular languages.  Indeed, at first there was apparently little use for them.  English translations of the New Testament (originally in Greek) transformed the euphoreo of the rich fool’s fertile fields into variations on ‘brought forth plentifully’ – following the preference of earlier Latin translators for a wholly different phrase (in the Latin, uberes fructus ager adtulit).  Still, euphoros – or, rather, one of its relatives – seems to have eventually captured the attention of learned European physicians, some of whom would have read the now more widely available Greek medical texts such as the Hippocratic De fracturis, in which euphoria describes patients’ abilities to recover from their injuries:

Modes of treatment and peculiarity of constitution make a great difference as to the capability of enduring such an injury. And it makes a great difference if the bones of the arm and of the thigh protrude to the inside; for there are many and important vessels situated there…[ii]  [my italics – indicating the translation of euphoria]

When reading documents such as these, early modern European physicians would have sometimes wondered if euphoria might not be handy as a term in itself.  Whether this has ever actually been the case is debatable.  Certainly, since its first discernible emergence in the English language in the seventeenth century, euphoria (or ‘euphory’) has been so little understood it has frequently required some form of accompanying definition.  For instance, in 1684 readers of the English translation of Genevan physician Théophile Bonet (1620-1689)’s Mercurius Compitalitius were advised that ‘the most certain rule for the quantity [of mineral waters] is the Euphory, or well bearing, when the Stomach dispenses well with it…’ (Bonet 1684, 674).  I am sometimes left wondering why people bothered with this word at all.  Indeed, some writers have even occasionally expressed a degree of irritation at their contemporaries’ employment of such an unnecessary term.  The British Medical Journal complained in 1905, for example, that: ‘a Paris professor not long ago informed his hearers that ‘the cessation of the hyperthermia determines a remarkable euphoria’; would he have been less enlightening if he had said that when the fever abated the patient felt much better?’ (Style in Medical Writings 1905, 1342).

Physicians and indeed laymen did not commonly employ this word prior to the twentieth century.  Nevertheless, where it does emerge in texts from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, euphoria usually names the experience or observation of improving or recovering health, and/or of everyday health and/or of perfect health.  Here, qualities thought to belong to health – such as pleasure, strength and ease– were perceived, named euphoria and held up an indication that health was indeed to some degree present in the patient.  Euphoria could be a feeling of health but it might also be less of a feeling and more an observable healthy action or behaviour: Bonet’s Mercurius Compitalitius appears to describe not a feeling but a state of good urination following the efficacious imbibing of mineral water.

The various meanings of euphoria across the centuries remind me of how much meaning can be shaped by context.  They also reflect what appears to be a fairly consistent desire to believe that health is a perceptible truth, and that the presence of health in both self and others is something that can sometimes be perceived with confidence.  Euphoria in European medical history is part of what appears to be an abiding wish – and one that probably extends far beyond the history of this word – to occasionally tell oneself that there is no longer any need to worry.  Everything, for the time being, is okay.  Health is here.  For most people, a simple statement such as ‘I am well’ or ‘he is a little better’ has been sufficient.  But for roughly three hundred years ‘euphoria’ was sometimes an option for European physicians who liked that sort of thing.  It was probably unique in most European languages for this ability to combine – in a single word – the cherished idea of people confidently perceiving health in their bodies or the bodies of other people.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, euphoria also began to name sickly experiences of health and wellbeing – largely in the fields of psychiatric and pharmacological research, and probably at first in German-speaking countries (Euphorie).  This sickly euphoria could sometimes be thought of as a more overwhelming experience than healthy euphoria – but not always.  The French physician Charles Féré (1852-1907) used euphorie to describe sickly experiences of varying strengths, from the intensely felt ‘euphoric crises’ of epileptics to the ‘general sensation of euphoria, of general well-being’ he claimed could sometimes be found in hysterics (Féré 1892, 190, 306).[iii]  The idea that sick people could misperceive their own degree of health was hardly new (although how much it was acknowledged in the past, or indeed in the present day, is difficult to know).  Neither was the conviction of the ‘experts’ that such misperceptions could almost always be distinguished from the ‘true’ perception of health by a sane, intelligent observer.  Euphoria became part of this history.  An identification of euphoria – even when it named a health delusion – continued to reflect the supreme confidence of the person making the identification.  There was little room for ambiguity.

Euphoria remains a medical term in the present day.  Now, it is probably a little more common for the people who use this word to question its meanings and, consequently, its value as a medical term.  In the treatment of multiple sclerosis it is sometimes pointed out that the way in which practitioners define ‘euphoria’ can significantly change the extent to which the emotions and behaviours of sufferers are pathologized and framed as an aspect of the condition.  In wider western culture, the meaning and value of this word is rarely questioned.  Here, euphoria can mean any number of things.  Often, however, euphoria now gives a name to shared hubristic enthusiasm.  ‘But this euphoria was not to last’ has become something of a ubiquitous tautology.  And still it is sometimes possible to sense the judgemental gaze, sifting false from true, and telling itself: ‘I know real health and wellbeing – and that isn’t it.’

[i] See Liddell 1940 for the meanings of euphoros

[ii] For the Greek see Littré 1973.  For an English translation, see Adams 1868.  The numbering system differs in each book.

[iii] ‘crises d’euphorie’, ‘générale une sensation d’euphorie, de bien-être général.’

References

Adams, Charles Darwin, ed. and trans. 1868. “De fracturis – 35.” In The Genuine Works of Hippocrates. New York: Dover.

Bonet, Théophile. 1684. Mercurius Compitalitius, or A Guide to the Practical Physician.  Translated by Théophile Bonet. London: Thomas Flesher.

Féré, Charles.  1892.  La pathologie des emotions; etudes physiologiques et cliniques. Paris: F Alcan.

Liddell, Henry George, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie, eds. 1940. A Greek-English Lexicon Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Littré, Emil, ed. and trans. 1973. “De fracturis – 36.” In Oeuvres Completes D’Hippocrate. Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert.

“Style in Medical Writings.” 1905. British Medical Journal 1, no. 2320 (June): 1341-3

 

Soul Health: Feeling Better Through a Medicine of Words

Posted on January 7, 2019 by and

Dr Daniel McCann is Simon and June Li Fellow in English Literature at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. In this post for the History of Emotions Blog, he discusses the connection between reading and healing, the subject of his new book Soul Health: Therapeutic Reading in Later Medieval England, (University of Wales Press, 2018).

McCann’s current research covers the later medieval period and is concerned with the interconnection and interplay between medical and religious texts. He is especially interested in how texts can evoke emotional responses, belief, doubt, and indeed other complex mental states through their form and style. He was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2012 and has published a number of articles that explore the relationship between emotion and healing, reading and healing, and medieval grammar and prayer. 

The connection between reading and healing has a history far deeper, and far darker, than modern “bibliotherapeutics” would lead us to believe. While you don’t have to look far to find accounts of ‘consoling fictions” offering mental and physical health, looking a little further into the past reveals something quite different. For the medieval period, reading had a strong medicinal potential that was believed to treat the very soul of the reader through the powerful emotions it could evoke. This was part of a wider medical model going back to classical times: the Galenic framework of the “res non-naturales”, or non-natural things, stated that the regulation of the emotions was key to maintaining humoral balance and so health. In particular, activities that could evoke moderate joy – or gaudium – were seen as beneficial in the regimental care of the self. Reading bawdy verses about lusty monks (for example) could provoke a salutary laugh – which was sometimes called hilaritas. And yet, while reading for pleasure and joy was recommended, the vast majority of texts in the Middle Ages were anything but joyful. Though Chaucer can provoke a laugh, we have to remember that the medieval “best-sellers” were those pious texts dealing with Christ’s suffering, torture, and death. The emotional tones and hues of such texts are vastly more complex, manifold, and difficult than simple joy. Moreover, they circulate in manuscripts that often extol their medical potential. For instance, the enormous Vernon manuscript (c.1390s) states from its opening that reading it provides “soul-hele” – soul health. It’s full of texts which, through their sophistication and beauty, set out to evoke sorrow, fear, compassion, and a host of other emotional states that are worlds apart from joy. This begs an important question of such reading material: how can emotions, widely understood to be dangerous, operate therapeutically?

It’s a question I wanted to answer in my first book, available to buy now. What I discovered is that the medieval monastic culture that produces such potent religious texts was not medically ignorant. From its earliest stages, and most clearly after the Benedictine reform, monastic culture had a keen interest in maintaining the health of the monks. Moreover, many medical texts – from medical compendia to vernacular herbals – were associated with, produced by, or at least held in, monastic libraries. To assert that dangerous emotions generated through reading are medicinal is not a mistake born of ignorance. It is instead a deliberate recommendation that comes from a complex understanding of the state of the soul, the nature of sin, and the potential use of the soul’s affective powers. Emotions can be medicines precisely because they can also be diseases. As key thinkers from the period – such as John of la Rochelle – note, emotions are not positive or negative in and of themselves. It all depends on the object of the emotions, and the level of their intensity. It’s a bit of a hackneyed commonplace to assert that the medieval period saw sin and sickness as the same thing – but it is an accurate one. Sin, the soul’s chief sickness, is essentially an emotional problem. As Walter Hilton, an influential medieval English spiritual writer, notes, sin is

not ellis but a fals mysrulid love of a man to himsilf. Oute of this love, as Seynt Austen seith, spryngeth alle manere of synne deedli and venial

 

nothing else but a false, ungoverned love of a man unto himself. Out of this love, as St Augustine says, springs all manner of sin deadly and venial.  

(Scale of Perfection, Bk 1, ll.1117-1118)

Love, when not properly directed or controlled, corrupts and festers. Here it is seen as the shared origin of all sin, and Hilton is recapitulating earlier monastic explorations into the precise nature of vices and virtues. Of course, such an emotional illness requires an equally emotional medicine:

Be contrition we arn made clene, be compassion we arn made redy and be trew longyng to God we arn made worthy. Thes arn iii menys, as I understond, wherby that al soulis come to hevyn . . . for be these medycines behovyth that every soule be helyd.

 

By contrition we are made clean, by compassion we are made ready, and by true longing to God we are made worthy. These are three means, as I understand, whereby all souls come to heaven…for they are medicines by which every soul is healed.

(Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, p. 54)

With customary clarity, Julian of Norwich asserts that the best treatment is a medicine of extremes, not of moderation. Contrition, compassion and longing are some of the most central emotional states of religious life, but they are also some of its most intense. There is no sense of balance to the emotions here, only their increasing potency and force. There is, however, a sense of order. This treatment is programmatic, moving from one emotion to another, from one medicine to another. My book takes Julian’s comments here as a starting point, and over the course of its chapters it explores the medicinal emotions that can heal the soul of sin. Fear, penance, compassion, and longing are the core ones. But as I soon discovered, the texts themselves understand emotions as fluid and layered, with each text seeking to evoke multiple emotions within the souls of its readers. For instance, compassion is not an emotion, but rather an emotional aggregate or complex. So too that last medicine she mentions, longing, is in effect a blend of contrasting and powerful emotional states. It is so intense that it will be painful, will contain as much fear of God and sorrow for sin as it does compassion and ardent love for the divine. The focus of the book is always on the texts of the Vernon manuscript, and how they work to promote the health of the soul. To do this requires moving beyond contemporary notions of “affective scripts” to look at language in more detail. In my book, I explore medieval grammar theory to understand precisely how words evoke emotions. It is the interjection (a cry or exclamation) which was believed to signify per modum affectus (in the mode of affect), and many texts use interjections with skill and precision to evoke specific emotions. For instance, the rhythmical prose text A Talking of the Love of God, makes careful use of interjections to try and evoke that complex longing for God in the reader:

A derworþe lord what schal I nou dou. nou mai I liue no more for serwe and forsore, now my dere lemmon schal vnderfonge deþ. nou mai I Murne strongley, nou mai I wepe bitterli nou mai I syke sore & serwen euer more. A now me leden him forþ to mount of caluarie, to þe qualstouwe to don him þere o dawe. A my deore lemmon, he bereþ þe Roode tre on his bare scholdre for þe loue of me. his bodi is so tendre, his bones longe and lene, al stoupynde he goþ þat del hit is to seone. A Mi swete lemmon, þe duntes þat þei smyte þe, þe serwe þat þei don þe.

 

Ah! Dear worthy Lord what shall I now do? Now may I live no more for sorrow and grief, now my dear darling shall undergo death, now may I mourn strongly, now may I weep bitterly, now may I sigh sorely and lament ever more. Ah! Now (me/they) lead Him away to Mount Calvary, to the place of execution to kill Him. Ah! My dear love, He bears the cross on His bare shoulder for the love of me. His body is so tender, his bones long and lean, all stopping He goes so that a pity it is to see. Ah! My sweet darling, the blows that they smite thee with, the sorrow that they do to you.

(A Talking of the Love of God p. 48, ll. 23–33)

 

Unlike prior passages in the text, this one begins with the impassioned interjectional cry to Jesus – that “Ah”. This emotional cry sets a tone for the rest of the passage, carefully sustained through repetition and additional interjections. Initially, the urgency and force of the opening question ‘what schal I nou dou’, is sustained through subsequent clauses by the repetition of its immediate answer ‘nou mai I’. Through this repetition, each clause is connected back to that forceful opening in a manner that directly recalls its emotive energy. The reader is thus constantly brought back to that cry throughout the whole section, its force and potency endowing each clause and each detail with added emphasis. Additional interjections break up the passage into dominant sense units and mark progress in the narrative, but they all work in the same manner to express and evoke raw emotion. The result is that each stage in Christ’s crucifixion is marked not by detail but rather by the emotive reaction to it. The whole passage thus plays with ideas of action and reaction. Until this moment all events in Christ’s Passion have occurred in the distant past, but now the present tense is used exclusively: the past of Calvary merges with the moment of narration, and by extension the moment of reading. Such reading was understood as emotionally evocative – producing passions in precise ways to help move the soul closer to a state of health – of salus. It is a medicine of extremes, and of extreme words at that, but as the Vernon manuscript shows, and as my book seeks to prove, the best medicines are always the bitterest.

REVIEW: Empathy: A History, by Susan Lanzoni

Posted on January 2, 2019 by and

Dr Riana Betzler is a philosopher of cognitive science, medicine, and biology. In this review for the History of Emotions Blog, she discusses Susan Lanzoni’s new history of empathy.

Riana’s current research focuses on social cognition and, in particular, empathy. Her research is informed by her background in cognitive science and time spent working in labs, conversing with practising scientists. She completed her PhD in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. Prior to returning to Cambridge as a Teaching Associate, she spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) in Klosterneuburg, Austria (near Vienna).

Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History (Yale University Press, 2018)

Image of cover of Empathy: A History

This expansive new account of the history of empathy demonstrates the ways in which the concept has been imagined and reimagined across multiple discourses over the course of about a century.

The story unfolds in roughly chronological order, showing how empathy developed from aesthetic roots, was taken up as a technical scientific term in clinical and social psychology, and then stood at the centre of political debate in the wake of World War II and during the Civil Rights Era.  Lanzoni uses thematic vignettes to elaborate on how the empathy concept was deployed for specific concerns at specific times.  For each of these vignettes, one gets the impression that there is enough material to fill a whole book.  Lanzoni identifies her approach as akin to David Armitage’s method of serial contextualism, which provides “a way of delving into significant historical moments with detail yet still holding to an expansive view” (p. 16).

The central questions that Lanzoni seeks to answer are: “How did we get here?  And can history shed light on what empathy means today?” (p. 8).  By “here,” Lanzoni seems to refer to the current state of ambiguity surrounding the meaning of “empathy”.  This ambiguity, and the sheer number of diverse definitions circulating in the field, has been widely acknowledged within the literature and is generally considered to be a problem.[1]  Definitional instability seems to threaten the prospects both for coherent interdisciplinary study of empathy and for application of the findings of empathy research to social and political problems.  Lanzoni argues that the history of empathy, however, shows that its meaning has always been ambiguous and multifaceted.  She contends that there is no one “definitive conception of empathy for all time” (p. 17) and suggests, as far as I understand, that we would be wrong to look for one definition for the present.  She “invites us to embrace many empathies” (p. 18).  This is a refreshing thesis amidst all of the hand wringing about the difficulties with defining empathy.

The book is organised into three parts: (1) Empathy as the Art of Movement; (2) Making Empathy Scientific, and (3) Empathy in Culture and Politics.  Each part is comprised of three chapters.  Lanzoni largely focuses on the development of empathy in the United States, but includes some reference to exchanges with British aestheticians, German theorists, and Viennese psychologists.

Part one identifies the roots of empathy in psychological aesthetics and the German concept of Einfühlung.  Einfühlung was originally conceptualised by Theodor Lipps and others as a way of understanding objects by projecting oneself into them.  This form of projection was thought to involve a kind of bodily resonance.  In the Anglo-American context, amateur psychologists such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and her partner Kit Anstruther-Thomson, conducted experiments in the art gallery using methods of systematic introspection.[2]

At around the turn of the twentieth century, Einfühlung was translated into English.  In describing the translation process, Lanzoni highlights the disagreements about terminology occurring at the time.  For example, many theorists, including James Mark Baldwin and Charles Sanders Peirce, were convinced that psychology and the mental sciences required clearer terms.  Baldwin sought to standardise psychological terminology by creating his Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology.  He did not, however, agree with the use of the term “empathy” as a translation for Einfühlung and instead put forward the term “semblance.”  Lanzoni effectively conveys here how terminological disagreements often reflected differences of opinion about the underlying concept and its scope.  Eventually, “empathy” won out as the term of choice but disagreement about its particular meaning persisted.  The aesthetic meaning of the term empathy continued to be dominant, but Lanzoni indicates that it started to move into the interpersonal domain through association with the extroverted personality type.

Google n-gram chart showing the frequency of use of “empathy” in English from c. 1900 to 2000

Part two is about making empathy scientific.  Lanzoni begins by explaining how empathy related to psychiatric diagnosis.  She focuses on the neuropathologist E. Ernest Southard’s development of an “empathic index.”  Interestingly, this scale was supposed to capture the psychiatrist’s ability to imagine behaving as the patient did; if the psychiatrist could not imagine behaving in such a way—if the patient’s behaviour was too outlandish—the patient was thought to be “beyond empathy” and likely to be suffering from schizophrenia (p. 10).  This represents a fascinating reversal from later empathy scales, which are supposed to measure the patient’s ability to empathize.[3]  Some scholars, including William James, expressed scepticism about the validity of this form of diagnosis by projection; the worry was that it committed the psychological fallacy, or made the false assumption that one’s psychological responses were identical to the ones being investigated.  Empathy also continued to be associated with the extroverted personality type, manifesting in the idea that schizophrenia was an extreme form of introversion; this suggests that people with schizophrenia were perhaps viewed as both beyond the clinician’s empathy and lacking in empathy themselves.

At this point, Lanzoni identifies a shift in empathy.  It was no longer conceptualized as involving the transfer of one’s feelings into another individual or object but instead required flexibility and control.  This idea of empathy as involving controlled identification carries into Lanzoni’s discussion of empathy in social work and psychotherapy, which centres on the work of Jessie Taft, Otto Rank, and Carl Rogers.  Interestingly, emotions enter more clearly into the picture at this point as well.  Jessie Taft, for example, viewed emotion as a valuable conduit to others.  Empathic identification during this period was seen as requiring serious training—training that was thought to be especially difficult for men with medical expertise.  Lanzoni demonstrates how the relational psychotherapeutic tradition therefore broke from both psychoanalysis and medicalized psychiatry.  She then turns to the development of measures of empathy by Rosalind Dymond Cartwright and others[4].  The issue of standardization again comes to the fore here.  Alongside a desire for rigorous scientific testing, there were significant worries about validity.  Were the various empathy scales measuring the same thing?  Were they really measuring empathy or projection?[5]  Similar kinds of concerns come up in the contemporary literature.[6]

Kenneth B. Clark with his wife Mamie Phipps Clark. Both were psychologists and civil rights activists. (Image Garland County Historical Society / Central Arkansas Library System.)

Part three concerns popular and political empathy.  Lanzoni discusses how empathy entered into everyday discourse after World War II.  This was partially a result of the popularization of psychology but also had to do with a desire for better social connections and interpersonal relations.  Empathy was seen as universalizing—highlighting the commonality among diverse individuals.  During this period of popularization, empathy was used for a dizzying array of purposes ranging from cultivating family bonds to developing advertising campaigns.  Empathy was also a subject of intense interest among social scientists and was seen as a crucial aspect of political engagement after World War II.  Lanzoni focuses on the work of Kenneth Clark, a civil rights activist who alongside the psychologist Gordon Allport, championed empathy as a way of overcoming racial division.  Clark and Allport worked to develop educational programs that were meant to cultivate empathy through roll playing and practice.  These educational programs were deployed, for example, in workshops with police officers.  By this point, empathy was seen as going hand in hand with justice and functioned as an aspirational value.

Finally, Lanzoni brings us into the present with a well-informed history of the brain science on empathy, starting with mirror neurons and then delving into the field of social neuroscience.  She argues that these neuroscientific studies provide a nuanced picture of empathy as involving both emotional identification and modulation through reason.  She also highlights the ways in which these neuroscientific findings hinge on “the capacity to describe, to illuminate, and to think through the meanings of empathy, a task that has occupied a diverse array of scholars over the past hundred years” (p. 275).  In this way, the neuroscientific literature cannot be seen as providing a more objective view of empathy, detached from the history of diverse conceptualization.

Lanzoni’s discussion of the neuroscientific literature also provides fodder for critique of the current anti-empathy trend.  This trend is exemplified by the work of Paul Bloom and Jesse Prinz, who are especially concerned with the relationship between empathy and morality.  Prinz argues that empathy is not necessary for morality and although he does not rule out its value altogether, he expresses scepticism about its benefits.[7]  Bloom goes further and argues that empathy is detrimental because it spotlights individuals in biased and parochial ways.[8]  According to Bloom, “From a moral standpoint, we’re better off without it”.[9]  Both Prinz and Bloom embrace definitions of empathy that focus purely on emotional sharing.  According to Prinz “empathy is a kind of vicarious emotion; it’s feeling what one takes another person to be feeling”.[10]  Bloom writes: “The notion of empathy that I’m most interested in is the act of feeling what you believe other people feel—experiencing what they experience”.[11]  Circumscribing empathy in a way that makes it purely emotional enables both Prinz and Bloom to highlight the ways in which unbridled empathy goes wrong.  On Lanzoni’s view, on the other hand, empathy is inherently multifaceted and encompasses elements of both emotion and reason.  It is therefore impossible to be simply for or against it; identifying its merits and pitfalls will require a sophisticated, detailed, and contextualized approach.

Lanzoni’s book provides a comprehensive and engaging account of the shifts in the meanings of “empathy”.  It brings out a number of themes that have been present throughout the history of empathy and that continue to be debated today—including the problem of projection, issues about objectivity, and the relationship between popular and scientific concepts.  There are, of course, some things that are left out.  For example, although the terms “sympathy” and “compassion” come up occasionally, Lanzoni does not explicitly delve into the immense disagreement, tension, and confusion that surrounds their definition and differentiation from “empathy.”  She also largely leaves out the debate about empathy as the root of the moral sense—a view that is grounded in the tradition of British sentimentalists such as Hume and Smith (who used the term “sympathy”) but has been revived in contemporary moral psychology.  While I can see how leaving these areas of discussion out lends the book greater focus, I was also surprised to see them downplayed.  The moral dimension of empathy in particular runs through some of Lanzoni’s vignettes—especially the ones about empathy in psychiatry and empathy in public discourse—and could have been more explicitly highlighted.

Overall, Lanzoni puts forward a view of empathy as flexible and skilful.  What history tells us, according to her view, is that empathy “comprises a complex, artful but also effortful practice that enrols feeling, intellect, and imagination” (p. 280).  Lanzoni convincingly shows how the complexity and multifaceted nature of empathy constitutes both its mystery and its promise.  Here we can also see how Lanzoni’s book, comprehensive as it is, leaves open space for further discussion.  What kind of normative import does this flexible and skilful form of empathy have?  Does this vary depending on context?  And is there anything still left at stake in continued disagreement about the value of empathy as opposed to sympathy or compassion?

References

[1] See e.g., Coplan, A. (2011). Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects. In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (pp. 3-18). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Similar worries can be found at the start of many articles on empathy in psychology.

[2] For more on Vernon Lee and the tradition of empathy in aesthetics, see: Burdett, C. (2011). ‘The subjective inside us can turn into the objective outside’: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 12.

[3] Such scales today are prominent within the literature on empathic deficits in disorders such as psychopathy (e.g., Hare, R. D. (1991). The Hare psychopathy checklist-revised: manual. North Tonawanda, NY: Multi-Health Systems), Inc. and autism (e.g., Baron-Cohen, S. & Wheelwright, S. (2004). The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High Functioning Autism, and Normal Sex Differences. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(2), 163-175.)

[4] Dymond, R. F. (1949). A scale for the measurement of empathic ability.  Journal of Consulting Psychology, 13(2), 127-133.

[5] See e.g., Hastorf, A. H. & Bender, I. E. (1952). A caution respecting the measurement of empathic ability. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 47(2, Suppl.), 574-576.

[6] Some discussion of these issues can be found in: Cuff, B. M. P., Brown, S. J., Taylor, L. & Howat, D. J. (2016). Empathy: A Review of the Concept. Emotion Review, 8(2), 144-153, DOI: 10.1177/1754073914558466er.sagepub.com.

[7] Prinz, J. (2011). Is Empathy Necessary for Morality? In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (pp. 211-229). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[8] Bloom, P. (2013, May 20). The baby in the well: The case against empathy. The New Yorker, ; Bloom, P. (2014). Against Empathy. Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum; Bloom, P. (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. London: The Bodley Head.

[9] Bloom, 2016, p. 4.

[10] Prinz, 2011, p. 212.

[11] Bloom, 2016, p. 4.

The magickal turn

Posted on December 14, 2018 by

Instagram witch Harmony Nice

Recently, I’ve noticed several friends and acquaintances – mainly millennials – getting into magick.  A 30-year-old successful professional woman who pays to consult a globe-trotting voodoo-priestess about her love life. A 33-year-old musician who’s left a humanist community and joined a coven. Stephen Reid, formerly a leader of UK Uncut, who then set up The Psychedelic Society and now runs magick rituals. I get the sense our culture, and particularly millennial culture, is having a magickal moment. But why is now the witching hour? Several possible reasons – these are just guesses. Millennial women are attracted to magick perhaps because it offers a form of spirituality that empowers young women, rather than subjugating them. The image of magick has gone from middle-aged bangly suburban women to hip young urban influencers like Lana Del Rey, or ‘witches of Instagram’ stars like Harmony Nice. Witches, says Cosmopolitan, are ‘the new social media influencers’. Magickal symbols increasingly show up on the catwalk, in music videos, or Netflix shows like the re-boot of Sabrina. Young women sign up to astrology apps, read Sabat magazine, and swap copies of Women Who Run With Wolves. There’s a networking aspect to it – covens are the contemporary equivalent of the 70s feminist circle, or the female equivalent of Masonic lodges. Magick has also flourished thanks to the internet, both as a medium for dissemination (wicca forums, astrology and tarot apps), and as an ethos. As the writer Erik Davis has explored, Silicon Valley tech-heads have been drawn to magick since the 1990s – it fits well with the idea that one can use tools or algorithms to conjure up virtual worlds, which in turn alter material reality and make you powerful and rich. Think of the opening scene of The Social Network. Eduardo writes an algorithm on his dormitory window and – abracadabra! – the whole of Harvard is in uproar within an hour.   More broadly, the rise of magick is part of the growth of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ demographic, particularly among millennials. Contemporary spirituality is decentralized and anti-hierarchical. We’re suspicious of gurus and priests, we’re not even sure we’re into a monotheistic God. We want our spirituality close to the Earth and nature, we prefer local spirits to transcendent principles. We want rituals, but prefer to make up our own rather than fit into crusty established ceremonies. Magick fits well with this DIY, bricolage spirituality. Both shamanism and tantric Buddhism have proved popular in Western spirituality, and both incorporate the magickal idea that you can use your imagination and intention to channel divine energies and change your reality. In some ways, it’s a ritualized version of the Law of Attraction – visualize the future you want, and it will happen. Both promise quick results. And who knows, maybe millennials are particularly drawn to magick because they grew up on Harry Potter. My generation grew up on Star Wars so we’re more drawn to eastern wisdom (Yoda). Magical politics I also wonder if we’re having a magick moment because of our desperate political situation. It strikes me that both Amazon shamanism and Tibetan tantric Buddhism are religions of the oppressed. These cultures, both at the mercy of foreign invaders for centuries, turned to magic out of despair, when they are outnumbered and the facts of material reality are against them. Are young Westerners also drawn to magick today out of political despair? I’ve been reading, this week, about the Kalachakra ritual, one of the highest tantric rituals in Tibetan Buddhism. It’s the Dalai Lama’s favourite ritual – he’s conducted the three-day ceremony 11 times in public, twice in the West, and once, in 1985, to 200,000 people in India. The ritual has different levels, open to different levels of initiate. The highest level apparently involves a male initiate having sex with one or more mudras, or female consorts. The male adept then takes on the female’s energy and becomes highly empowered by balancing male and female energies within him (the woman is typically an accessory to male empowerment in Tibetan tantra).The Dalai Lama has hinted he’s taken part in this highest-level sex magick – it’s curious to think this kindly old man, global symbol of inoffensive spirituality, is also a high-level sex magician. Hey, if he can still do it at 83, good luck to him. The lower levels of the Kalachakra ritual are more open to the lay-person, and the Dalai Lama has authorized the English translation of the ritual. It’s basically a very long and extremely complicated visualization process. The initiate imagines entering a palace shaped like a mandala, then imagines seeing various deities and spirits, and becoming one with them. It’s a feat of both imagination and memory to keep this extremely complicated picture in your mind. I took part in a Tara tantric empowerment once, and I was lost after five minutes.

The Kalachakra mandala, painted onto sand, is then visualized by initiates as a magickal, reality-altering symbol

It’s interesting to consider, in passing, how important the imagination is to Tantra, to shamanism, to Sufism, and to Christian meditative traditions like the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. In all of these traditions, the imagination is a divine power which can transform the psyche and also transform the body (meditate on the Passion intensely enough and you will receive the stigmata). Modern psychology has learned a certain amount from these wisdom traditions, but I don’t think it has a deep appreciation of imagination – what it is, what it can do, how we can use it to change ourselves. But these traditions don’t think the imagination can just change the mind and body. They also think it can change the world.
The Kalachakra ritual, for example, is more than just a ritual of personal transformation. It’s a magickal rite of political transformation, a weapon of war for a dispossessed people. The text mentions the myth of the magical hidden kingdom of Shambhala. Supposedly, in the future, the world will descend into chaos and barbarism. The armies of darkness – described in the text as mlecchas – will come together under a world-emperor. At that point, the magical kingdom of Shambhala will reveal itself, and its king will ride out with his armies and magical weapons,and utterly rout the enemies. Then Tibetan Buddhism will be established as the world religion, and the Earth will enter a golden age of peace and prosperity. This is the Tibetan Buddhist version of Jihad. The mlecchas are identified as the followers of Mohammad and Jesus. Contemporary Tibetan Buddhists, naturally, say the jihad is just a metaphor for an inner revolution, but that was not the case historically – the myth seems to have arisen when Buddhist communities were being attacked by Muslims in Afghanistan and north India, and pushed back into the Himalaya. This grand fantasy of revenge was born out of historical defeat and despair. I wonder – does the Dalai Lama think that initiating hundreds of thousands into the Kalachakra today will help save Tibet from Chinese occupation? Perhaps millennials are also drawn to magick out of a need for sense of control amid bewildering global change. The Atlantic asked earlier this year why millennials are so into astrology and came to a similar conclusion – they’re an anxious generation at a difficult historical moment, and astrology gives them something to hold onto (even if they don’t totally believe in it). Certainly I find myself paying more attention to astrology in times when I feel stuck and unsure what to do. Perhaps the turn to magick expresses this sort of political despair and hope for a miracle. I noticed Stephen Reid, formerly of UK Uncut and now director of the Psychedelic Society, organized a magickal ritual in Parliament Square as part of Extinction Rebellion – in eight years he’s gone from traditional socialist activism, to psychedelics, to magick. Myths of the apocalypse or golden age are also coming back into the mainstream – the myth of Shambhala has struck a chord with some environmental activists like Joanna Macy (here she is talking about it). Friends warn me of the astrological turbulence set to hit the world in 2019, or the Maian prophecy, or the end-time warning of some Amazon elders. This is exactly what you’d expect to see happening now, when we’re going through a historical crisis comparable to the birth of modernity in the 15th to 17th-centuries. Back then, as the historian Norman Cohn explored, Europe was filled with end-time prophecies and sudden millenarian movements – the prospect of apocalypse propelled many unlikely prophets to temporary prominence. They would inspire their followers with their incredible certainty, seize control of the historical moment, proclaim the coming of a Golden Age, and then inevitably, be routed as their dream failed to materialize. I see contemporary western politics as increasingly prone to magical thinking. Like medieval peasants, we suspect our enemies have access to secret occult powers. We blame the rise of Donald Trump on chaos magick, and try to use our own magick against him. We try to concoct the magical spell, formula or symbol that will galvanize the masses and save the world. We rely on imagination to save us from the present quagmire. ‘What’s money really?’ asks Russell Brand. ‘It’s just an imaginary concept. We can just stop believing in it.’ It’s true that, in the short-term, magickal techniques – stories, symbols, mantras, ceremonies – can have surprisingly large political impacts, because politics is partly a question of trying to seize the public’s imagination. This is what scholar of the occult Gary Lachman calls ‘meme magic’. You come up with a mantra like Take Back Control, or Make America Great Again, and see if it spreads in the imagination of the masses. You come up with a symbol like the Guy Fawkes mask beloved of the Occupy movement, which was created by comic magician Alan Moore. Or you conjure a utopia to aim for, like the Shambhala myth, or a dystopia to avoid, like the Tory party’s Project Fear.

The comic writer and magician Alan Moore goes to Occupy London and sees the magickal symbol of rebellion he created (in V for Vendetta) playing out in this world

So in that sense, political magick does work. But if it isn’t backed up by effective policies in the material world, the city in the sky dissipates into thin air.  Look at Trump’s magical MAGA spell, for example. He very effectively conjured a dream into his followers’ fevered imaginations. Hillary is a crook, a Satanic witch. The elite are evil, possibly demonic. He is going to save America, drain the swamp. He’s going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it. But, two years into power, the intoxication is wearing off, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious, there’s no wall. Where’s the magic wall? The more Trump and his government insist the wall is a reality,the more they sound like Hitler in his bunker in 1944, insisting the war is nearly won. The magic trick is exposed. I expect we will turn to increasingly far-out forms of magical politics this century, in our desperation to avoid the grim facts of material reality.  Still, we do need a miracle. We need hope. At the very least, we need to be able to imagine a future beyond the collapse of the status quo. If that’s magical thinking, pass me a wand.

Trump and Nietzsche

Posted on October 19, 2018 by

I wasn’t a big reader as a youth. I was more of a jock and a class clown. It was only around the age of 17 that I suddenly became a moody adolescent book-worm – it was both a quickening and a sickening. In one term, I read Hamlet, King Lear, Heart of Darkness and Freud’s Five Cases of Hysteria, and also watched Blue Velvet. Strong medicine! I had a sudden horrifying and fascinating sense of the dark subconscious bubbling beneath civilized appearances.

The book that made the biggest impression on me, by far, was Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. I was transfixed by his description of the play of two opposing forces in ancient Greek culture – the Apollonian, which seeks limits and moderation, and the Dionysian, which seeks excess and ecstasy. I started to see these forces everywhere. Every essay I wrote weaved its way inevitably back to the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The obsession continued at university. Fifteen years later, I wrote my first book on the Socratic path to flourishing, and my second on the Dionysian path. How long a shadow that book has cast!

Strangely enough, I never read other books by Nietzsche. I got my Nietzschean philosophy second-hand, from the novels of DH Lawrence. But recently I was sent a new biography of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux, called I Am Dynamite. I devoured it – it’s a beautiful, moving, and very absorbing account of a heroic and pathetic life. And it inspired me to read more Nietzsche, and consider influence on our time a little more deeply.

Nietzsche grew up in a fairly well-to-do German family in Prussia, but the family fortunes took a turn for the worse when his father – a Lutheran pastor – died of a degenerative brain illness in his 30s. The family became hard-up, but Nietzsche lifted them up through his academic brilliance. He was appointed a professor of philology at the age of 25, but he dreamt of being a composer. He managed to befriend Richard Wagner – already a European celebrity – and spent the happiest days of his life at the Wagner castle, where he was embraced as one of the family. For a few years, he moved in the exalted atmosphere of Chateaux Wagner – all high ideals and swooning ecstasies.

But his 30s were not as glorious as his 20s. He wrote The Birth of Tragedy at 28, but it was greeted with ominous silence by the press and academic peers. It was so over-the-top in its ecstatic style, compared to the average plodding academic work. Then he fell out with Wagner, and fell in love with a 20-year-old Russian, named Lou Salome, who ultimately rejected his advances and humiliated him. He was prone to terrible migraines and digestive troubles, and was often confined to bed for days. He found himself tramping across Europe, from city to city, self-publishing his own books, and almost always alone.

Nietzsche in a humorous photo with his friend Paul Ree and 20-year-old Russian tearaway Lou Salome. The three lived in a sort of Platonic menage a trois for a while, before Lou and Paul abandoned the besotted Nietzsche. He became markedly more misogynistic afterwards. ‘You go to women?’ he wrote. ‘Do not forget the whip.’

Yet somehow, out of these inauspicious circumstances, his ideas burst forth, more and more confident and radical. He was certain that he had an entirely new vision of existence, which would destroy the last 2500 years of morality, and pave the way for a bold new adventure for mankind.

When one reads the great prophets of moral philosophy – the Buddha, Plato, the Stoics, Christ, the author of the Upanishads – one notices that they all preach self-knowledge, self-examination, self-control, sobriety, chastity and asceticism of the body. Only through this self-denial, we are told, can the virtuous person go beyond desires and appetites, beyond appearances, beyond impermanence, and arrive at some transcendental resting place – the One, God, the Logos, Buddha-nature, Brahman.

Nietzsche, through his great ‘transvaluation of values’, turns all these systems on their head. Their morality is not virtue and health. It is sickness, weakness, pessimism, nihilism, a symptom of decadence and decline. It is the consolation of the weak, the broken and the disappointed, those who turn wearily from life and ‘put their last trust in a sure nothing rather than an uncertain something’.

He writes, perhaps with the Buddha in mind: ‘They encounter an invalid or an old man or a corpse, and straightaway they say ‘Life is refuted!’ But only they are refuted, they and their eye that sees only one aspect of existence.

These famous moral systems are really an outgrowth of ‘slave morality’. The slave-philosopher Epictetus is a perfect example. He has no power over external things, so he says that true power, true freedom, is power over one’s thoughts and desires. How convenient. Then, like Socrates, he preaches this acceptance-of-weakness to strong aristocratic youth, and ruins them.

The ‘slave-morality’ was first invented by the Jews, Nietzsche says, out of their weakness and domination by various more powerful races. Judeo-Christianity pretends to be a morality of meekness and forgiveness, but underneath that mask lurks resentment and passive-aggression. ‘I forgive you’, they say to their conquerors, but what they really mean is ‘I’m better than you’. And the Romans, alas, fell for it.

Against the slave-morality, Nietzsche champions the masters, the ‘blond beasts’, those strong, carefree warriors who maraud across the world from time to time, like the Vikings, the Teutonic knights, the Mongols, the Indian Kshatriyas, the Greek aristocrats. They were young, healthy, vigorous, laughing, cruel and violent. They basically did what they liked, and called it ‘noble’, and had a gay old time of it until Socrates, Jesus, Lao Tse and the Buddha came along and ruined everything.

Nietzsche thought that liberal democracy was really an extension of Christianity, with its sympathy for the weak and the rights of man. He looked across late 19th century Europe, with its campaigns for universal suffrage, gender equality and the welfare state, and saw the triumph of slave morality, the triumph of the herd, the masses, the little people. It made him sick. He railed against the plebs, and especially against female suffrage – ‘the struggle for equal rights is a symptom of sickness’, he wrote. Healthy women loved to obey men. Only barren women fought for equality.

Democratic, plebeian, mediocre Europeans had lost any sense of greatness. They’d lost even the memory of God and of their predecessors’ heroic struggle for transcendence. They just wanted comfort and ‘well-being’. Nietzsche was no fan of well-being:

You want, if possible—and there is not a more foolish “if possible”—TO DO AWAY WITH SUFFERING; and we?—it really seems that WE would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been! Well-being, as you understand it—is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an END; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible—and makes his destruction DESIRABLE! The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering—know ye not that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto?

Instead, he lays out a new vision for humans, a new project: the Ubermensch, or Superman. He writes in Thus Spake Zarathustra: ‘I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome.’ We should seek to transcend ourselves not in the service of ‘super-terrestrial hopes’ like God or Nirvana, but rather in the service of self-actualization. This self-actualization – becoming what we are – does not involve the disciplining of the body, the emotions and the desires, but rather letting the desires, emotions and body sing and dance. It does not mean a weary obedience to rules and precepts handed down by priests, but rather the bold creation of new values. Man creates meaning, he does not receive it from God. And this self-actualization will be here and now, in this body, on this Earth, or it will be nowhere. We must resist the urge to find consolation and security in fake metaphysical dreams like God or Nirvana, and instead learn to dance with uncertainty and chaos.

By 1888, Nietzsche felt he had blown his way clear of the old morality, and was euphoric with the new prospects he saw for mankind. He wrote four books in nine months, they poured out of him. He was filled with joy, and even lost control of his face and his emotions – he couldn’t stop grinning. He saw coincidences in everything. ‘He only had to think of a person for a letter from them to arrive politely through the door.’ His letters to his friends became increasingly manic. He started to allude to himself as Dionysus, or ‘The Crucified’. ‘I shall rule the world from now on.’ ‘In two months time I shall be the foremost name on the earth’.

In January 1889 he had some sort of breakdown in the streets of Turin. It is said he saw a man whipping a horse, and he clung to the horse’s neck and wept. How poignant if this is true – the man who condemned pity breaks down in pity! He retreated to his apartment, where he screamed and danced naked. His friend Franz Overbeck was contacted, and found Nietzsche cowering in a corner, trying to read his writings but obviously unable to comprehend them. He never recovered his mind – never seemed to know who he was or what was happening.

He was 44, but lived for another 11 years. His sister Elizabeth, who sounds an evil and selfish anti-Semite, took care of him, and cashed in on his growing success. She ran salons celebrating his work in the living-room, while Nietzsche howled in his bedroom upstairs. She controlled his estate, and turned him into a prophet of Nazism. Hitler came to visit, and emerged from their conversation bearing Nietzsche’s walking stick.

Was Nietzsche’s collapse a divine punishment for his hubris and over-reaching? Some kind of psychosis or spiritual emergency? Or a neurological illness, perhaps inherited from his father? We don’t know. But, just as he prophesized, in the years after his collapse his influence grew and grew. His dynamite philosophy blew a hole in Victorian complacency, and created a space for the fierce experimentation of modernism.

For some years after World War 2, Nietzsche was understandably out of fashion. But he’s been rehabilitated since the 1970s, and is now one of the most popular subjects for philosophy PhDs. Scholars have clarified that, unlike his sister, he wasn’t anti-Semitic – he admired Jewish culture. Nor was he a nationalist – he thought nationalism was a cheap intoxicant, despised German militarism, and called himself a ‘good European’. He was a key influence on Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and helped to create what Paul Ricoeur called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ which is so popular in left-wing humanities and social sciences: what secret interest lurks under an ideal? Aren’t all claims to ‘truth’ or ‘beauty’ really disguised power-grabs by particular interest groups?

This new biography will add to his good reputation – what a heroic man we meet, what a stylist, what a humourist! Who else has chapter headings like ‘Why I am so clever’! Who else can tear apart an entire philosophy (like Stoicism) with a few hilarious sentences. What brilliant psychological insights he threw up in his inspired frenzy – on the unconscious, the ego, projection, the wisdom of the body.

It’s awkward, then, that this new, sympathetic, rehabilitated Nietzsche should prove to be so popular with the alt-right. The American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer has said he was ‘Red Pilled by Nietzsche’, and many other angry young white men on alt-right or Red Pill websites have nothing but praise for Nietzsche. They don’t get him, insist liberal or leftist defenders of Nietzsche. They’re misappropriating him. They’re making the same mistakes the Nazis made.

Oh come off it. Foucault is right that there are many Nietzsches, but one of the most consistent notes one hears is contempt for the masses and hatred of liberal democracy, equality, and the rights of women, workers or the weak. As I read his books this week – particularly Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals  – I thought how well it fit with the alt-right worldview: Liberal democracy is a monstrous cacophony that seeks to shame and emasculate strong men. It is a dictatorship of the offended, the resentful, and the easily bruised, who seek power through victimhood and hurt feelings. This conspiracy of the weak will only work if strong men fall for it – if they become cuks or ‘white knights’, in alt-right and Red Pill terms – if they are so credulous as to believe that women or minority groups really are interested in ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ rather than simply power and domination. But the strong man, the Alpha male, will break the bonds of liberal guilt and roam free, just like Trump, Bo-Jo, Bolsonaro, Orban, Duterte, Erdogan, Berlusconi, and every other blond or not so-blond beast now strutting on the world stage.

How could the alt-right and Red Pillers not thrill to passages like this, where Nietzsche gets nostalgic about the good ol’ days of rape and pillage enjoyed by the ‘blond beasts’:

They enjoy freedom from all social control, they feel that in the wilderness they can give vent with impunity to that tension which is produced by enclosure and imprisonment in the peace of society, they revert to the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters, who perhaps come from a ghostly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with bravado and a moral equanimity, as though merely some wild student’s prank had been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now an ample theme to sing and celebrate.

It reminds one of Kavanaugh – it’s all just student pranks…just bants!

There are passages where Nietzsche even sounds like Trump – in his insults against women, and his absurd boasting: ‘At no moment of my life can I be shown to have adopted any kind of arrogant or pathetic posture’, he says, before continuing: ‘Anyone who saw me during the seventy days of this autumn when I was uninterruptedly creating nothing but things of the first rank which no man will be able to do again or has done before, bearing a responsibility for all the coming millennia, will have noticed no trace of tension in me.’ It reminds me of Trump’s immortal line: ‘I’m much more humble than you would understand’.

How could fascists not grin at Nietzsche’s Strangelovian denunciations of the superfluous dwarves of liberal democracy, who don’t deserve any sympathy – in fact, it is just this sympathy which has led to the ‘DETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN RACE’? How could they not cheer at his calls for ‘the higher breeding of humanity, together with the remorseless destruction of all degenerate and parasitic elements’, at his yearning for ‘the harshest but most necessary wars’, at his praise of violence and cruelty as the source of all higher culture, at his endless comments like: ‘The weak and the failures shall perish. They ought even to be helped to perish’.

I could give many such quotes. Nietzsche can’t be called a fascist or alt-righter, because he never stayed in one position long, and he rejected any political action as ‘filth’. But the alt-right can find a lot to love in him. I’m sure sometimes he is being provocative – just bants! – but words and ideas easily slip off the page and kill people.

And this champion of strength and virility was a sickly and weak man, a failure in the army, a loser in love, who claimed not to need public attention yet became more and more megalomaniac until he claimed to be a god. He’s right that there can be something morbid and unhealthy in Stoicism and other philosophies of consolation – but there is also, surely, something morbid and resentful in him, the impoverished and humiliated Prussian constantly insisting on his aristocratic rank. One can find him interesting, funny, fascinating, even sympathetic, and still be honest about the toxicity of his ideas and the damage they do.

Perennialism and fascism

Posted on October 5, 2018 by

Aldous Huxley and Rene Guenon

 

While I was in San Francisco, I got the chance to meet Michael Murphy, one of the founders of the Esalen Institute. It’s a cross between a spiritual retreat centre and an adult education college, perched on the cliffs of Big Sur next to some hot springs. It’s been very influential on transpersonal psychology and American spirituality.

Murphy and I discussed the cultural influence of the ‘mystical expats’ – Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts and Christopher Isherwood – on the vision of Esalen and on American culture in general. They helped to popularise the idea of the ‘perennial philosophy’ – the idea there is a common core of wisdom at the heart of all the great religious traditions, and one can use spiritual practices from various traditions. That idea is now at the centre of American culture – being ‘spiritual but not religious’ is the fastest-growing demographic in American religion.

It was a treat to hear Mike’s fond reminiscences about them – how he and Esalen co-founder Dick Price were turned on by hearing Huxley lecture on ‘human potentialities’, how they went to meet Gerald Heard in LA and came away mesmerized and burning with the desire to found Esalen, how Huxley and his wife Laura came to meet them in Big Sur and insisted on seeing the local butterflies, how they first dropped acid with Laura, how Alan Watts was the greatest spontaneous speaker Murphy ever heard.

I was particularly interested to hear Murphy make the connection between the San Francisco Renaissance – the cultural movement ranging from the Beats to the Hippies and arguably still ongoing in Silicon Valley – to the Bengal Renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th century.

The Bengal Renaissance was a cultural flowering involving creative thinking in politics, science, the arts and religion. One of its chief ideas was the perennial philosophy.  One finds perennialism in the religious movement called ‘Brahmoism’, which was started by the great Bengali thinker and reformer Ram Mohan Roy in around 1850, and which suggests that all religions are partial formulations of the transcendent divinity within us. One also finds perennialism in the teachings of Vivekananda, dashing Bengali prophet of Vedanta, who caused a sensation when he visited the Parliament of Religions in Chicago and declared that all religions are true.

I often encountered the same cheerful perennialism while travelling in India last year – in the Theosophical Society’s headquarters in Chennai (which has temples to all the major religions), in the integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, in the teachings of Ramana Maharshi. I spent two weeks in a Zen / Jesuit retreat in Tamil Nadu, where we bowed to both Christ and the Buddha. This perennialism was a breath of fresh air after a period of desperately trying to be a Proper Christian.

Murphy pointed out to me that the ‘mystical expats’ helped to transmit the perennialist fire from Bengal to California. Heard, Huxley and Isherwood popularised Vedanta, the Hindu mysticism brought to the West by Vivekananda; while the evolutionary spirituality of Sri Aurobindo was transmitted into the Bay Area through the American Academy of Asian Studies – a small college that Alan Watts helped to found, which evolved into the California Institute of Integral Studies (Murphy was a student there). Watts also helped to transmit Zen and Daoist thinking into San Francisco, inspiring everyone from Jack Kerouac to John Cage. The perennialist spark caught fire in American culture, and now it’s widely accepted.

Perennialism and renaissances

It’s interesting that the ‘perennial philosophy’ was transmitted from one famous cultural renaissance to another. It got me thinking about perennialism and renaissances. If one looks back at the ‘American Renaissance’ – the sudden flowering of American literature led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and including Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville and others – one also encounters the perennial philosophy, particularly in Emerson and Thoreau. The stern Puritan soul of America suddenly relaxes, expands, and sees its smiling reflection in other cultures – in Platonism, in Hinduism, in a blade of grass.

One also finds the hot spring of the perennial philosophy bubbling up in the Romantic era, in Coleridge and Blake (‘all religions are one’) and, earlier, in the Italian Renaissance, at the Platonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino, who translated the works of Plato and ‘Hermes Trismegistus’, and sought to find a harmony between Christianity, Greek philosophy and Kabbalah. The optimism and creativity of this movement sings in the ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’ of Pico della Mirandola, and shines in the radiance of Botticelli and Raphael.

The perennialist stream bubbles up yet again in the Islamic Renaissance (more usually known as the Islamic Golden Age), which is usually connected by scholars to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars translated the works of Greek and Roman philosophers and scientists.  One can trace the connection between the perennial philosophy and cultural flowerings all the way back to the Athenian Golden Age of the fifth century BC, when again, the human soul looks up from narrow tribalism, and smiles. Socrates declares: ‘I am a citizen of the universe’, leading the Stoics to suggest that all humans have a spark of the divine logos within them.

These are important moments of collective epiphany and cultural evolution in the story of homo sapiens. What they seem to have in common is a strong sense of cultural self-confidence – ‘we are Indians!’, ‘we are Americans!’, ‘we are Athenians!’ etc – with an openness to other cultures and the best they have to teach. And there’s a sense of optimism in progress, a sense of humans rising up and realizing their inner divinity – you see this in Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration, in Emerson’s great sermon on self-reliance, in Huxley’s lectures on human potential.

The varieties of Perennialism

But then I thought, perennialism isn’t always optimistic and hopeful. While researching the perennial philosophy, you can’t help but come across a movement called Traditionalism. It was started by a French thinker called René Guénon in around 1920. Like the mystical expats, he was initially inspired by Vedanta, then he flirted with Catholicism, got into Taoism, before moving to Egypt and becoming initiated into a Sufi order. He inspired other traditionalists including Fritjof Schuon, Julius Evola and Mircea Eliade.

There’s a lot of similarities between Huxley et al’s Perennial Philosophy, and Guénon et al’s Traditionalism – they share the idea that western civilization has lost its soul in mechanical materialism, and that only a return to the core of wisdom at the heart of the great religious traditions will save civilization from collapse.

And yet Traditionalism is a much more pessimistic movement. Guénon and his successors, like the followers of Gurdjieff, thought wisdom could only ever be esoteric, reserved for the initiated elite. The masses would never get it. Traditionalists were constantly joining or creating esoteric secret societies, like the Gnostic Church, the Masons, the Maryamiya, the ‘Fraternity of the Cavalier of the Divine Paraclete’, or the ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’.

They typically despaired of democratic politics, and flirted with the far-right – in Julius Evola’s case, this flirtation was quite explicit, as he tried to ingratiate himself first with Italian fascism and then with the Nazis. Mircea Eliade also had connections to the Romanian far-right. Where Huxley et al became cheery prophets of human potential, the Traditionalists were doom-mongers of the Apocalypse – they insisted we’re in Kali Yuga, a Hindu dark age of conflict and spiritual mediocrity. Humans aren’t ascending, we’re on the down-elevator, so the elite should withdraw and prepare for the deluge, or possibly seize power.

Reading about the Traditionalists yesterday, it struck me how human destinies can flow in such different directions from similar plateaus. I can well imagine Huxley et al becoming authoritarian Traditionalists. Huxley, like many modernists of his generation, was an aristocratic elitist – whenever he writes about bourgeois or proletarian mass culture, he invariably uses the word ‘squalid’. He and Gerald Heard often wondered if the perennial philosophy was suitable for the many, or just the initiated few. They pondered this in the 1950s and 60s with regard to psychedelics (Huxley decided they should just be for the intelligentsia). Heard, who in his last years became a guru to wealthy libertarian CEOs, suggested that spiritual education should focus on an elite – whom he called the ‘neo-brahmins’ – who could then rise to power and influence. Particularly during World War 2, one finds the same note of deep cultural pessimism in Huxley and Heard’s writings as one finds in Guénon and Evola.

Why, then, did the mystical expats not become gloomy quasi-fascist Traditionalists? One reason is surely California. While Guénon was fulminating in a Cairo bedsit, Huxley and his gang were picnicking with Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin in the Hollywood Hills. They were living in gorgeous pads in Santa Monica. They were having too much fun to be fascist. Maybe the LA weather made them cheerier. Or maybe they found a culture more hospitable to their ideas – they were on the radio, on TV, lecturing away on campuses and at places like Esalen. Perhaps that gave them an optimism in human potential.

Another reason is Huxley and Heard had more faith in scientific progress than Guénon, who thought the urge to quantify everything was a symptom of the Kali Yuga. Huxley and Heard thought psychology could shed new light on the human psyche, that new psycho-spiritual methods could be discovered and disseminated, new drugs discovered. They may be right, although quantified spirituality has all kinds of risks – both Huxley and Heard can be over-credulous in their faith in new research.

Whatever the many causes, their lives ran in a different direction, and they took a bet on democratic mysticism – mysticism for the many, not the few.

Today, more and more of us are perennialists – a quarter of adult Americans are ‘spiritual but not religious’, and 35% of American millennials. Yet we can still see how many different directions a tide can break. We can see that Bay Area spirituality can easily become elitist – we the 1% are the spiritual supermen, the rest of society is screwed, let’s move to New Zealand, or space. We see that the perennial philosophy can still become deeply pessimistic and quasi-fascist – Steve Bannon and other alt-righters sing the praises of Julius Evola (my dark namesake) and argue that western civilization needs to re-embrace spiritual wisdom before it is over-run by immigrants.

I feel a strain of cultural pessimism in me too. Are we in an age of cultural ascent, or cultural decline? I’d probably go with Guénon and say we’re in the Kali Yuga. Thanks to people like Watts and Huxley, we have a very wide spirituality, with more and more people practicing wisdom techniques from Stoicism / Buddhism / Hinduism etc. But the width of participation seems to come at the cost of the height of attainment – where are the saints? Where are the masters? Every guru turns out to be a sex-pest. And, like Huxley, I worry about over-population and the damage we are doing to the ecosystem. It seems more likely to me that this century will be one of cultural collapse than spiritual ascent.

Clearly, I need to move to California and cheer up. Anyway, width of participation in spirituality is probably more important than height of practice. If several million people learn a bit of wisdom and suffer a bit less, that seems good to me. The ascent of humanity is very slow, but we’re getting there, together.

Dépaysement

Posted on August 10, 2018 by

Amy Dolley took the History of Emotions undergraduate module at Queen Mary University of London during 2017-18. In this post, one in a series of contributions by QMUL students to the History of Emotions blog, Amy introduces and explains the unfamiliar emotional state of ‘dépaysement’. 

Ever since I can remember I have been absolutely terrified of snakes. It’s not the most bizarre phobia – in fact, lovers of snakes are usually the ones to face more judgement – but it is definitely a severe one in my case. The exact reason why I detest the reptiles so strongly I cannot discern for sure. Perhaps it has something to do with an early experience of Sunday school Genesis teachings, which ingrained in my mind the association of snakes with Satan himself, or merely the understanding of the fatality just one bite can cause. Whatever the reasons, I have grown up extremely fortunate to live on an island where the beasts do not roam in the wild. That is, until recently.

After months of saving, myself and a friend travelled to Indonesia last summer. The moment I set foot on the warm and alien Indonesian ground, I felt an emotion that I was unable to articulate – one of excitement, nervousness, curiosity and insecurity. A few days into our travels, we found ourselves in a beautiful little village at the top of a mountain. It was here where a friendly local approached me with a mammoth snake draped around his shoulders and asked me if I wanted to hold it. If this had happened back at home, even in the comfort of a zoo, I would have certainly refused but, fuelled by this strange emotion I have just attempted to describe, I said yes. I was still terrified, but the new environment I found myself in seemed to enable me to step outside of my comfort zone and overcome my phobia.

So how do we describe this rush which pushed me towards a brief cuddle with one of my biggest enemies? The French have a word which encapsulates this emotion and is unique to their language: dépaysement. According to the Collins French-English Dictionary, this is a noun that refers to the feeling of disorientation that occurs when you find yourself in a country that is not your home. If we deconstruct the word, we can discover a little more depth to this definition. The French word pays translates as country, and dépayser means something like ‘to disorientate’. Many have speculated that dépaysement literally means ‘decountrification’.

In The Book of Human Emotions, Tiffany Watt Smith argues that this word is typically French, as “the French seem to be particularly intrigued by emotions to do with disorientation.” She then gives the examples of ilinx (the strange exhilaration that comes with causing chaos) and l’appel du vide (the frightening urge to leap to one’s own death) to affirm this claim. However, one doesn’t have to be French to experience dépaysement. Emotions that we recognise and that are similar to it include homesickness, nostalgia, and wanderlust, and we will look at examples of people from different countries experiencing dépaysement in a while.

One also doesn’t need to be aware of the term dépaysement and its meaning to experience it either. A lovely example of this is described by mother Mona Rasmussen who, in the Globe and Mail, describes her adopted eleven month old daughter experiencing dépaysement. Her baby, Grace, was born in China but moved to Canada with her new mother when she was a few months old. Rasmussen recalls Grace’s look of longing when a man next to her spoke in her mother tongue, and describes her as turning towards him “…the way a flower turns toward the sun.” Rasmussen believes her daughter was feeling dépaysement that day – a longing for her home country.

Although its definition does not label it as a positive or negative emotion, dépaysement has historically been regarded as the latter – the reasons for which we will explore in a moment. My purpose is to show how dépaysement can be a wonderful thing which enables us to overcome fears and discover a new side of ourselves, if it is embraced correctly.

Dépaysement has a strong presence in French literature, and – as aforementioned – has tended to be depicted as a negative emotion. Joseph Gerard Brennan’s study of three novels of dépaysement provides examples of popular works which have described it as sparking immoral behaviour: L’Immoralise, The Ambassadors and Der Zauberberg. André Gide’s L’Immoraliste, for example, tells the story of Michel, who travels to Algeria with his wife on their honeymoon. In this foreign land Michel discovers a “new self” and is described as descending into immorality, particularly because of his sexual encounters with young Arab boys.

Gerard explores the prominent theme of dépaysement in the three novels mentioned – all published in the early twentieth century – and this negative narrative of the French emotion also exists in other novels, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). Similarly, these two stories describe the protagonists’ decent to savagery which occurs when they enter exotic lands.

Whilst I disagree that dépaysement leads to an erosion of morality, its portrayal in literature does show how it has long been regarded as a negative emotion. However, the real danger in dépaysement that needs highlighting is the association of it with national identity. The renowned early twentieth-century anthropologist, Bronisław Kasper Malinowski, provides evidence of this in his various studies of indigenous cultures, most notably in Argonauts of the Western Pacific.

Malinowski amongst the Trobriand Tribe, Wikimedia Commons

In his book of anthropological essays, Transcendent Individual, Nigel Rapport demonstrates how Malinowski shows how European travellers have been overwhelmed by their encounter with dépaysement, and have resorted to racism to explain the feelings it brings. Malinowski describes this as a “continuous ethical conflict” and he should be celebrated for highlighting and attempting to dissolve this.

This conflict was heightened by the remarkable improvements in travel that occurred a few decades prior to Malinowski’s career. Ships were beginning to sail around the globe, such as The Great Eastern, which could take 4,000 passengers from England to Australia and reached nearly every corner of the British Empire. A boom in railways and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 also enabled more people to visit African and Asian colonies. More and more Europeans were experiencing dépaysement as they found themselves on unfamiliar soil, and the prevailing colonial attitudes at the time certainly resulted in an association with the feeling of unfamiliarity with an assumption that home really was the best place to be.

In her article, ‘Cats and Poets in Old France’, scholar Eve Drobot gives an insight into dépaysement’s reputation in France, claiming that “it has long been a negative notion to the French, a people whose sense of self derives traditionally from a sense of place.” Although this is a massive generalisation, Drobot is alluding to dépaysement’s potential to encourage imperialism. It is possible for one to visit a country foreign to them and, after sensing the dépaysement, blame the feeling of uncertainty on the country itself, and not homesickness. It also works the other way round – a strong sense of pride over home can hinder one from embracing dépaysement in a way that allows a positive and exciting adventure.

Pierre Loti, Wikimedia Commons

However, the history of dépaysement is not entirely dark and in the same article Drobot does admit that, in recent years, it has endured a new, optimistic approach, particularly in academic spheres. One individual who has shed a positive light on dépaysement is the French author Pierre Loti. He was a French naval officer who, in the late nineteenth century, documented his travels to various countries, including Tahiti, Japan and Senegal, and the word dépaysement crops up a lot in his work. He writes that his first experience of the emotion occurred when visiting family in France and, instead of discovering that dépaysement led to immorality or nationalism, Loti enjoyed the sensation. It is interesting that he does not deny that a degree of sadness does come with dépaysement, as he misses home, but he delights in this and writes about the joy and excitement it brings too. For Loti, the charm of dépaysement is found within the blend of feelings that it produces and his various works, such as Aziyadé, Le Désenchantées and Le Roman d’un spahi are a testament to this.

We can learn a lot from Loti, who strongly resented European imperialism. He shows how we should regard dépaysement as a form of wanderlust, not homesickness, and I encourage you to fully embrace the emotion when you next travel away from home. When asked on twitter what dépaysement means to her, Marie Thouaille writes that she regards it positively and enjoys the refreshing quality of being in a new environment.

If we approached visiting new places with this attitude, it would certainly aid the breakdown of divisions between cultures and nationalism whilst allowing the individual to experience something new – and potentially defeat a phobia! In his short 1982 New York Times article, ‘Discovering the Hidden Paris’, John Vinocur instructs travellers on how to deal with their feelings of dépaysement in Paris in particular, asking visitors to “…[embrace] its alienness, its exoticism and its vitality by running after what is both common and hidden.” There is certainly a vogue for foreign emotional words today, and I hope that dépaysement does not remain a fleeting fashion, rather it becomes a way of life which enables us to experience new places and, as a result, discover new aspects of our character.

Follow Amy on Twitter: @AmyDolley

Further Reading

Jean Anderson, “Dépaysements/Becomings: The Role of the Randell Cottage Writers Residence”, New Zealand Journal of French Studies, 35:2 (2014)

Lesley Blanch, Pierre Loti: Travels with the Legendary Romantic (Tauris, 2004)

Eve Drobot, “Cats and Poets in Old France: The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History”, The Globe and Mail (1984)

Joseph Gerard Brennan, “Three Novels of Dépaysement”, Comparative Literature, 22:3 (1970)

Jean-Michel Rabate, Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (University of Pennsylvania Pres, 2012)

Nigel Rapport, Transcendent Individual: Essays Toward a Literary and Liberal Anthropology (Routledge, 2002)

Mona Rasmussen, “A Piece of the Past”, The Globe and Mail, 2014

Stanley Walker Rockwood, A Comparative Study of the Works of Pierre Loti and Joseph Conrad (University of Wisconsin, 1929)

John Vinocur, “Discovering the Hidden Paris”, The New York Times (1982)

Clive Wake, The Novels of Pierre Loti (Mouton, 1974)

Tiffany Watt Smith, The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust (Profile Books, 2015)

A Bloody Shame

Posted on July 16, 2018 by

Dr Hetta Howes is a Lecturer in English at City University. After studying for her BA and MPhil at the University of Cambridge, she joined Queen Mary in 2012 to begin her doctoral thesis on the role of water as a literary metaphor in late-medieval devotional prose, currently being turned into a monograph: Transforming Waters in Medieval Devotional Literature. She is one of the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers for 2017/18 and is committed to communicating her research to a wider audience.

Lyrics crop up everywhere in medieval manuscripts, whether they are compiled as part of a verse collection or scribbled on spare leaves, crammed into the space between prose works and prayers. The forthcoming essay collection Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems (edited by Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead) showcases the variety of forms and functions of medieval lyrics, from biblical paraphrases to lyric interventions in Chaucer. My own contribution to this volume spotlights a short lyric written by the Franciscan friar William Herebert in the fourteenth century. In it, I’m particularly interested in exploring the emotional side of lyrics. To put it another way, I’m interested in how medieval lyrics might teach their readers how to feel.


Unknown Artist, ‘Minstrels with a Rebec and a Lute’,
13th Century, Manasseh Codex, El Escorial, Madrid

The later Middle Ages saw a craze for a new kind of text: the Passion meditation. (I have previously written for this blog about the connection between Passion meditations, women and water). These guided meditations not only describe events from Christ’s life, Passion and death but ask the reader to imagine themselves as either a witness or active participant in those events. So the reader is encouraged to imagine watching Christ being flogged, or struggling with the heavy load of the cross as the crowds taunt and jeer him. But they may also be urged to become a part of the action; to go and wipe Christ’s brow, or to wash and kiss his feet. Moreover, they’re encouraged to feel a myriad of emotions – awe, dread, pity, shame, sorrow. In this way, a more personal, intimate and emotional relationship with Christ is fostered. Whilst these Passion meditations are usually found in prose works of spiritual guidance (often, if not exclusively, targeted at women) the techniques of the genre can also be seen at work in medieval art – evocative images of a bleeding, suffering Christ – and in other forms of writing, such as medieval lyrics.

Fra Angelico and Assistants, ‘Meditation on the Passion, The Man of Sorrows with
Instruments of the Passion with the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Thomas Aquinas’, Italian, c.1441-1442, Florence, Convent of San Marco

In a fifteenth-century carol the narrator, who remains unmoved by scenes from Christ’s Passion, hears a woman weeping. He quickly discovers that she is, in fact, the Virgin Mary. Seeing her tears of grief he tells her that he cannot cry, for he is so ‘harde hartid’ (hard-hearted). She continues to weep, saying that nature must ‘move’ him, and by the end of the lyric the narrator is weeping himself, his heart softened by his interaction with Christ’s grieving mother. ‘Who cannot wepe come lerne at me’ is Mary’s repeated refrain. With it, she teaches not only the fictional narrator but also whoever might be reading or listening to the carol to soften their hearts, to allow Christ’s suffering to permeate. In this way, the lyric acts as a kind of ‘affective script’ (a phrase coined by Sarah McNamer, and which you can read more about here: https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2015/12/sarah-mcnamer-on-affective-scripts-in-sacred-and-secular-literature/).

William Herebert’s biblical paraphrase of Isaiah, Quis est iste qui uenit de Edom? (Who is it that comes from Edom?), predates both this late-medieval carol and the craze for Passion meditations in the later Middle Ages. However, Herebert’s small but careful additions to his biblical source suggest that he is aiming not only to transform the Bible passages into verse but to use them to create a similarly affective script. His lyric is not only tailored to produce a particular emotional response in the reader but ultimately to help them convert that initial emotional response into a more productive, devotional state. The emotion? Shame. The devotion? Contrition and penitence.

The lyric is framed in the manuscript as a dialogue between a group of angels and the solitary figure of Christ, a doughty knight who enters the scene fresh from battle with blood-red garments, just like those worn by the treaders of a winepress. On the surface, the lyric seems to be engaged with the Old Testament idea of Christ-the-warrior, rather than the New Testament Christ, who suffers at the hands of his tormentors. However, whilst Herebert does stay close to his source (Isaiah 63:1-7), he also makes a number of embellishments which allude to the Passion, and introduce the idea of shame. He inserts a number of bloody details, noting the ‘grisliche’ (grisly) nature of Christ’s clothing. He emphasises Christ’s solitude after the ‘battle’ he has fought, reminding us that many witnessed it but no one went to help  – and in doing so he recalls Christ’s metaphorical battle during the Passion, for the redemption of mankind, which he fought alone.

Alongside these bloody additions, Herebert also amplifies the emotion of shame, which is only hinted at in the original biblical verses. The dialogue format of the lyric, between Christ and the angels, forces the reader or listener into the role of bystander. Medieval Christianity taught that by suffering the Passion, Christ redeemed the sins of all Christians – the sins of those living afterwards, not just of those living before. Many medieval texts, therefore, imagine the everyday sins of medieval Christians rewounding, or even recrucifying Christ, long after the historical event itself. The reader’s role in Herebert’s lyric is to stand by and watch the action unfold – there is no opportunity to imagine running to Christ’s aid, to involve themselves in a way that might alleviate their own shame in bringing about the Passion through their sins. They must stand, watch, and feel the full force of their emotion.

Anonymous, ‘The Crucifixion with St Bridget in Adoration’ 1495-1510, The British Museum

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. The final lines of the lyric encourage the reader to move on from their emotional shame and to convert it into something more productive:

‘On Godes milsfulnesse                   mercifulness

Ich wole by-thenche me,                  I will bethink me

And herien Him in alle thing           and praise; everything

that He yeldeth me.’                        grants

Reader/listeners are prompted to feel shame. Crucially, however, they are also prompted by the final lines to pursue a proper outlet for this emotion, one that is scripted for them by the penitential Jews: mindfulness of Christ, his victories and his sufferings, followed by contrition and penitence. The emotion must come first: it is the catalyst. But the emotion shouldn’t be wallowed in; the reader shouldn’t become ‘adreynt in shennesse’ (drowned in shame) but should use their emotion to propel constructive devotional practice.

Paying attention to lyrics such as Herebert’s Quis est iste qui uenit de Edom can help to reveal just how aware of emotion, and its devotional potential, medieval authors actually were. Herebert recognises the importance of shame, as a catalyst for devotion, whilst remaining alive to the fact that wallowing in that emotion might metaphorically drown a reader. He artfully elicits emotion in his reader, whilst also encouraging them to put that emotion to good use by encouraging a reflection on sin in both personal prayer and confession. In his rendering of this popular biblical verse, Herebert, therefore, doesn’t just teach his reader what to feel, but also how to feel.

Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, ed. Whitehead and Boffey (Cambridge: forthcoming September 2018)

My essay, and the lyric itself, can be found in ‘‘Adreynt in shennesse’: Blood, shame and contrition in Quis est iste qui uenit de Edom?’ is forthcoming in Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, ed. Christiania Whitehead and Julia Boffey (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer; forthcoming September 2018). The lyric can also be found in The Works of William Herebert, ed. S. R. Reimer (Toronto, 1987), p. 132, no. 16

 

What to do in a spiritual emergency

Posted on June 15, 2018 by

Last month I organized an event on ‘what to do in a spiritual emergency’ –you can see videos of the talks here. Three of my friends spoke bravely and lucidly about their own experiences – psychotherapist and film-maker Anna Beckmann, poet and transformational coach Louisa Tomlinson, and Tai-Chi teacher Anthony Fidler – and Dr Tim Read, a wonderfully wise and compassionate psychiatrist, gave us his perspective. It felt great to talk openly and sympathetically about still feels quite a taboo topic – spirituality in general is a bit of a dirty word in the very secular UK (especially in academia), and spiritual crises are even less often discussed.

I wrote about this topic in The Art of Losing Control, and it’s become particularly important to me after the mini-crisis I had last year, following my ayahuasca retreat. A friend referred to it as a ‘breakdown’ this week, which didn’t feel quite right, because it was also something beautiful and healing.

So what does ‘spiritual emergency’ mean exactly, and what can we do when they occur?

There is an overlap between spiritual / religious / ecstatic experiences, and psychosis. Psychiatry has historically viewed all religious experiences as pathological, labelling them ‘hysteria’, ‘ego-regression’ or ‘psychosis’ and ignoring any positive aspects. That’s partly because psychiatrists have tended to be anti-religious secular materialists, battling the church for authority over the care of souls.

However, some psychologists (and a few psychiatrists) have suggested an experience can be both spiritual and quasi-psychotic. This ‘transpersonal’ perspective was put forward by psychologists and thinkers like Frederic Myers, William James, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass and Stanislaf Grof – who coined the term ‘Spiritual Emergency’ and brought out an excellent anthology with that title in 1980.

A spiritual emergency involves the sudden collapse of one’s habitual ego and customary sense of reality, and an opening to a different reality (which one could call the subconscious, or the archetypal layer, or the dream-world, or alternatively the Self or God – it’s a movement both downwards and upwards). It can involve a powerful sense of connection to all things, perhaps a transcending of time, space and matter, and a deep sense of meaning and awe. And it can also be extremely messy, painful, terrifying and dangerous, and have psychosis-like features like mania, ego-inflation, insomnia, voices, visions, ontological uncertainty and emotional disturbance. But unlike a psychotic illness, it can be a transition to growth, if handled sensitively.

Anthony told us: ‘It’s easy to get an idea of the life journey as a tidy evolution. But there’s another way humans grow, through revolution. The personality structure that’s evolved through childhood builds up like a building. And at some point in life it can be healthy for that to collapse. It can be a moment of growth, a journey forwards. But it doesn’t look like that. It looks like a piece of shit.’

Anna told us of her experience in her twenties:  ‘It was the most horrifying experience I ever had, and also the most awesome.’ Louisa said: ‘A spiritual emergency is when there’s an opening between the two worlds – the spiritual and the material – but it happens without maps or guides. What could be a successful integration into a larger self and reality becomes instead intensely terrifying, a failed initiation, which instead of leading to transformation, leads to fragmentation and sometimes to annihilation.’

What are the triggers?

Both Anna and Louisa spoke of how unresolved trauma was a trigger for their spiritual emergencies. For me too, the turbulence I felt after my ayahuasca retreat was partly a resurfacing of trauma from my late teens and early 20s. Trauma seems to create an ego structure that is more prone to what Tim Read calls ‘high archetypal penetrance’ (HAP) states – the subconscious and the transpersonal or spiritual dimension gets through the cracks easier.

There may also be a genetic predisposition to altered states – you might have some genes in your family that predispose you to schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, which make you schizotypal without necessarily developing into a psychotic disorder. One notes that in some cultures, shamanism is considered an inherited ability, as are psychic powers – a tendency to absorption or dissociation gets passed through the genes, and this can lead to creativity and insight as well as disturbance, eccentricity and illness.

More immediate triggers include being physically isolated from one’s friends and family. My crisis occurred when I was in South America, Lou’s when she was alone in Dartmoor, Anna’s when she was in New York, Anthony’s when he was in China. Tim has written about a near-crisis he had while travelling in India. Such crises can occur at moments of difficult transition – going to university, say, or breaking up from a long-term relationship.

And then there are triggers like not eating or sleeping properly, or going on a spiritual retreat, or taking drugs. Tim says he has often encountered people who’ve had spiritual crises after attending spiritual retreats – he writes about this in his excellent book Walking Shadows: Archtypes and Psyche in Crisis and Growth, and notes that retreats often shift people’s egos but fail to help them integrate their experience in the days and weeks afterwards.

What does a spiritual emergency feel like?

Both Lou, Anthony and Anna spoke of a feeling of ego dissolution accompanied by physical dissolution – they felt they went out of their bodies, and the material world seems to dissolve. I had a similar experience on ayahuasca, as many do. It is terrifying, because you don’t know if you’ll come back, so I can’t imagine what it’s like to experience that for several days or weeks. But I wonder, too, if this dissolution of the ego and material reality is an insight into the actual nature of things – Buddhists say we perceive the world as made up of separate solid things (me, the table) where actually there is a continuum of energy. Buddhist monks try to get to a state where you go beyond the perception of solid things. But it is terrifying if that happens when you’re not ready for it.

There’s also a collapse of boundaries – between the self and other people (can you read my thoughts, can I pick up your feelings and thoughts?); between you and the world (‘I can control traffic lights or even world events with my mind, it’s all connected to me’); between dream and reality. Anthony suggests we have at least two types of consciousness – a movie camera that projects waking reality, and a movie camera that projects our dreams. And in psychotic episodes, these two movies overlap, so the mythical movie of the dream-world gets superimposed on reality. Both Anna, Lou and Anthony had strong archetypal aspects to their experiences – religious imagery, messages, a sense of cosmic significance to their thoughts and acts. There can be intense surges of energy, powerful gusts of emotion, lights, visions, voices.

And there’s a deep ontological uncertainty. Anthony says he didn’t know if he was dead, or in some sort of altered bardo state. That was the same for me – for a week, I couldn’t work out if I was dreaming or in the afterlife. In Tim’s book, some of his case studies also don’t know if they’re dead or in heaven. It’s common on powerful psychedelic experiences to think you’re either dead or about to die. The ego interprets its dissolution as actual death. You find yourself still conscious and in some reality, but you can’t take anything for granted about how it works. In psychological terms, it’s a profound de-automatization. Your habitual automatic expectations of reality are dissolved. I would get on a plane and wonder if it would really take off or not, as if I somehow had to will it to take off (it was my dream – I was making it all happen).

What helps?

In his book, Tim Read emphasizes the importance of ‘set, setting and integration’ for navigating this sort of spiritual turbulence. This is also one of the main conclusions of my book, The Art of Losing Control.

Set refers to the mind-set one brings to the moment. In ecstatic states of consciousness – like psychedelic consciousness – our mind becomes extremely sensitive. It can swing from euphoria to terror in a moment. So you need to foster certain attitudes, above all mindfulness. Don’t worry about the past or future, focus on what is happening now. We need to try to remember ‘I’m in a spiritual crisis’ or ‘I’m tripping’ rather than get swept away by the powerful thoughts and sensations. Feel whatever you’re feeling, and observe it without attachment or aversion.

The breath is very important for this. It grounds us in the present moment, it relaxes our emotions, and it connects us to our body. Lou speaks of the ‘silvery chord of my breath’ being the only thing that connected her to her body and to physical reality. Someone once said we’re spiritual beings having an in-the-body experience – we need to connect to the body, enjoy this sensual material reality (nature is good for this too, so are hugs). It was also hugely important for me, in moments of panic, to breathe slowly, and remind myself ‘this will pass’.

A second important attitude is humility – not giving way to ego-inflation and Messianic grandiosity. Anthony says: ‘If you think you’re Jesus or the Buddha, that’s OK. But you’re also this person. And if I’m the Buddha, so are you.’ You have a glimpse of the infinite Self within you. But it’s within everyone, not just you. Relax. Don’t take yourself or the experience too seriously. You’re not controlling the universe. Have a sense of playfulness. Anthony talks about having an open and curious attitude to one’s experience – what does it feel like? How does this reality behave?

Third, we need to take care of ourselves. Yes, you’re the infinite cosmos, but you’re also this particular being in this particular body. Have patience and compassion for your ego and body. Look out for yourself – make sure you eat and sleep, don’t put your body in danger. Be polite, pay for things, even if you think it’s all a dream. Self-compassion is the key – even when I felt very alone and frightened, I rooted for myself. I was on my side, no matter how much the volatility swept away my tidy life-plans.

Painting by the sectioned artist Louis Wain

Secondly, setting is crucial. It helps if you have loving, understanding friends to support you while you are ‘transitioning’. When I came back from South America, I couldn’t tell what was real, I could barely understand conversations, and luckily my friends were there for me, and weren’t freaked out, because they’d had similar experiences (Lou is one of my best friends).  I loved getting hugs from my friends, I loved stroking my brother’s dog and cat, I loved sitting by his fire – I grounded myself in love and touch. Getting out into nature was also really healing for me. I avoided seeing people who wouldn’t get what I was going through.

Third, integration is very important. I came back to this reality within a week or so, but worked on the integration for several months, and am still working on it. I started seeing a therapist who is open to the transpersonal perspective. I found a community where I could practice meditation with others. There are also communities like the Spiritual Crisis Network and the Hearing Voices Network which offer support.

Sadly, western psychiatry is often the worst setting or integration process for this sort of experience. As Tim told us, most psychiatry is meaningless – it doesn’t accept that these sorts of experiences could have meaning, could be a stage in a person’s growth. Tim writes: ‘the medical intervention often serves to entrench stasis and impede growth’. Anna really wanted support during her crisis, but was terrified of being locked up and treated as totally mad. She was lucky, probably, not to be sectioned – most secure psychiatric wards are horrible, harsh, loveless and soulless places. Tim, who led the Emergency Psychiatry Service at Royal London Hospital, writes: ‘It is one of the great tragedies of psychiatry that our most vulnerable people are placed in the most unsuitable settings.’

And western culture is also rather an inhospitable and even hostile setting for such experiences – we don’t talk about them, and we see messy breakdowns as awful, shameful and frightening, something to hide away, rather than potentially something painful but wonderful, like giving birth!

However, just as there is a risk of materialist fundamentalism, there is also a risk of religious or spiritual fundamentalism – Anna talks about how she would feel these ecstatic experiences and hunger for them, but she came to see this was a way of bypassing her pain. We can use our spiritual experiences as ways of not dealing with this reality, this body, this life with all its messiness. Tim Read writes about one case study of spiritual narcissism, a young man who focused so exclusively on his spiritual experiences that he lost the capacity to negotiate this world. We need to balance our life in this world with our yearning for the transcendent, so we don’t become a ‘total space-cadet’ as one ayahuasca facilitator put it to me. We also need to be open to ambiguity and uncertainty, to sometimes not knowing precisely where we are on the path.

None of this is meant to deny that there are psychiatric illnesses which are mainly physical in origin, and which are not transitions to higher selves. I also know that, for some people, psychiatric medication is helpful and even life-saving. And sometimes being sectioned is necessary to protect people and society.

Tim and I are now going to put together a book of people’s first-person accounts of spiritual experiences, to answer the questions – what are they like from the inside, and what did people find helpful? The focus is on the practical things that help people, the set and setting. If you’d like to contribute, more details can be found here.

Finally, I wonder what these experiences say about the nature of reality and God. I think evangelical Christians can have a naïve view of God and the tidiness of religious experiences. You meet Jesus, who is totally loving and good for you, and instantly both this life and the afterlife are better. In fact, spiritual awakenings often feel like death, and can totally mess up your life. They’re closer to the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Burning Bush and the Book of Job, the God who turned Nebuchadnezzar into a beast and made Ezekiel lie on his side for 430 days.

What does it say about God, or the Self, that sometimes spiritual awakenings can destroy a life, can actually lead people to starve themselves or jump off a building in their search for transcendence (two instances mentioned in Tim’s book).

To me it suggests that sometimes the dissolution of the ego and the opening to the Self is incredibly rough, sometimes fatal. It can be a confrontation with a Shiva-like god – the cosmic creator and destroyer. It makes me hope that reincarnation is real, so we can hope that, while the archetypal call of the Self is sometimes harmful and even fatal to the individual, eventually, over many lives, we move towards the light. Or maybe God / the Self / the Tao doesn’t care about individuals, only the awakening of the species. Or maybe there is no God. Even if there isn’t, we can still help people navigate these rough moments of ego-dissolution, so that they can move towards positive and fulfilling lives, as Lou, Anthony, Anna and I have done.

Tim and I are now co-editing a book of first-person accounts of spiritual emergencies, with a focus on what practical advice can we share for people going through them. Find out more, and submit your synopsis for a chapter, here

Nebuchadnezzar 1795-c. 1805 William Blake 1757-1827 Presented by W. Graham Robertson 1939 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05059