Ch. 8: Existential Isolation Flashcards
(47 cards)
1
Q
What do we learn from deep inquiry?
A
The process of deepest inquiry leads us to recognize that we are finite, that we must die, that we are free, and that we cannot escape our freedom. We also learn that the individual is inexorably alone.
2
Q
3 types of isolation
A
Interpersonal isolation: generally experienced as loneliness, refers to isolation from other individuals
- Function of many factors: geographic isolation, lack of appropriate social skills, conflicted feelings about intimacy, personality style (schizoid, narcissistic, exploitative, judgemental)
- Cultural factors also play a role
- Environment, e.g. in US there’s been a decline of intimacy-sponsoring institutions - extended family, the stable residential neighborhood, the church, local merchants, the family doctor
Intrapersonal isolation: process whereby one partitions off parts of oneself
Existential Isolation
Yalom will focus just on Existential Isolation to keep the text to a manageable length
- However, the three are connected, they feel the same and masquerade for one another
- Therapists frequently mistake them
- Existential isolation is often kept within manageable bounds through interpersonal affiliation
3
Q
Whole again
A
To make oneself whole again is the goal of most psychotherapies
Note the common etymological root of “whole”, “heal”, “healthy”, “hale”
4
Q
Existential isolation
A
Existential isolation refers to an unbridgeable gulf between oneself and any other being. Even further, a separation between the individual and the world.
5
Q
Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward, the protagonist, Angel
A
“He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.”
6
Q
DEATH AND EXISTENTIAL ISOLATION
Heidegger “My death”
A
It is the knowledge of “my death” that makes one fully realize that no one can die with one or for one.
Heidegger: “No one can take the other’s death away from him.”
We may be surrounded with friends, though others might die for the same cause, or at the same time, still at the most fundamental level dying is the most lonely human experience
7
Q
Everyman
A
Everyman is visited by Death who says that everyman must take his final pilgrimage to God
- Everyman asks the character Kindred to go along, but he refuses (“As for me, ye shall go alone.”)
- He asks cousin, who pleads that she is indisposed
- He asks all the characters - Fellowship, Worldly Goods, Knowledge. Even his attributes desert him - “Beauty, strength discretion / When death bloweth his blast / They all run from me full last”
- Everyman is finally saved from the full terror of existential isolation because one figure, Good Deeds, is willing to go with him.
- That’s the message as it’s a Christian play, for the modern secular man there’s no one to come along.
8
Q
The Loneliness of Being One’s Own Parent
A
Responsibility implies authorship; to be aware of one’s authorship means to forsake the belief that there is another who creates and guards one.
- Deep loneliness is inherent in the act of self-creation
- One becomes aware of the universe’s cosmic indifference
9
Q
Defamiliarization
Highly successful executive at 12
A
Existential isolation impregnates the “paste of things”, the bedrock of the world.
- But it is so hidden by layer upon layer of worldly artifacts, each imbued with personal and collective meaning that we experience only a world of everydayness, of routine activities, of the “they”
- We are lulled into a sense of cozy belongingness; the primordial world of vast emptiness is buried and silenced, only to speak in brief bursts during nightmares and mythic visions
A highly successful executive patient of Yalom had a moment at 12 when he was lying on grass, looked at the sky and had the experience of drifting away into space between stars and the earth.
- He insists that the helplessness and aloness was so powerful that then and there he decided to make himself so renowned and mighty that he would never have this feeling again
PS! Yalom doesn’t believe in one-time decisions
10
Q
Robert Frost
Kurt Reinhardt
Heidegger
Kierkegaard
Antonioni
A
Of course, this experience is not “out there”, it’s within us. Robert Frost:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between the stars - on stars where no human race is
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places
Kurt Reinhardt:
“What threatens is “nothing” (no thing), and he finds himself alone and lost in the void. But when this dark and terrible night of anguish has passed, man breathes a sigh or relief and tells himself: it was “nothing” after all. He has experienced “nothingness.”
Heidegger uses the term “uncanny” (“not at home”) to refer to the state in which one loses the sense of familiarity in the world. Anxiety serves as a guide to lead one back, by way of uncanniness to awareness of isolation and nothingness.
- As dasein falls, anxiety brings back from its absorption in the “world”. Everyday familiarity collapses… “Being-in” enters into the existential “mode” of the “not-at-home.” Nothing else is meant by our talk of “uncanniness.”
The ultimate dread occurs in the face of nothing. Both Kierkegaard and Heidegger were fond of word play involving nothing. “Of what is man afraid?” “Of nothing!”
Italian filmmaker Antonioni was a master at portraying defamiliarization, e.g. The Eclipse
11
Q
Defamiliarization involves more than objects
A
Roles, values, guidelines, rules, ethics
- “Disidentification” exercise in chapter 5 in which participant has to answer the question “Who am I” and then meditate on the experience of giving up each of these (man, father, son, dentist, husband, catholic, bob)
- Some experience being “a disembodied spirit gliding in a void”
12
Q
Social explosions
A
Uncanny are the social explosions that suddenly uproot the values, ethics and morals that we have come to believe exists independently of ourselves
- The Holocaust, mob violence, Jonestown massacre, chaos of war, all of these strike horror in us because they are evil
- They also stun us because they inform that nothing is as we have always thought it to be, that contingency reigns, that everything could be otherwise than it is
- That there is no solid ground
- That we are “not-at-home” here or there or anywhere in the world
13
Q
GROWTH AND EXISTENTIAL ISOLATION
The dilemma of fusion-isolation
A
The words of growth imply separateness: autonomy (self-governing), self-reliance, standing on one’s own feet, individuation, being one’s own person, independence. Not to separate means not to grow op, but the toll of separating and growing up is isolation.
The problem of relationship is a problem of fusion-isolation.
- On one hand, one must learn to relate to another without giving way to the desire to slip out of isolation by becoming part of that other.
- On the other hand, one must also learn to relate to another without reducing the other to a tool, a defense against isolation.
- Bugental: “The human being’s basic interpersonal task is to be at once “a-part-of” and “a-part-from”.
As I shall now discuss, it is the facing of aloneness that ultimately allows one to engage another deeply and meaningfully.
14
Q
How does one shield oneself from the dread of ultimate isolation?
A
One may take a portion of the isolation into oneself and bear it courageously
Or to give up singleness and enter into a relationship with another, either with a being like oneself or a divine being
- However, “I will differ from traditional interpersonal psychology and will not focus on security, attachment, self-validation, satisfaction of lust, or power, but instead shall view relationships according to how they assuage fundamental and universal isolation.”
Yalom: “I believe if we are able to acknowledge our isolated situations and confront them with resoluteness, we will be able to turn lovingly toward others.”
15
Q
NEED-FREE LOVE
A
In order to fully understand what relationship is not it is first necessary to understand what a relationship can be.
16
Q
Martin Buber
A
“In the beginning is the relation.”
- Buber’s proclamation is rooted in his Jewish mystical thought and modern relational theory
- He believed that the individual is part of the Covenant - each contains a divine spark that in concert reveal the holy presence
- Each is united through the spiritual association to the universe
- “Man does not exist as a separate entity, man is a create of the between”
17
Q
“I-It” and the “I-Thou”
A
“I-It”: relationship between a person and equipment, a “functional” relationship
“I-Thou”: wholly mutual relationship involving a full experiencing of the other
- Differs from empathy because empathy is merely an “I” attempting to relate to “other”, but in “I-Thou” there is no “I” as such
- In “I-Thou” it’s not the “I” that has pre-eminent reality - an “I” that can decide to relate to “Its” or “Thous” that are objects floating into one’s field of vision
- The “I” is “betweenness” - it appears and is shaped in the context of some relationship
- With each “Thou” and with each moment of the relationship the “I” is created anew
- When one relates to a “Thou” one’s whole being is involved
- When relating to “It” - whether a thing or a person made to a thing - one holds back something of oneself: observing from many different perspectives, categorizing, analyzing, judging and deciding upon its position in the grand scheme of things
18
Q
True listening
A
If one is to truly relate to another, one must truly listen to the other
- Relinquish stereotypes and anticipations
- Allow oneself to be shaped by the other’s response
- Buber’s distinction between “genuine” and “pseudo” listening obviously has important implications for the therapeutic relationship
19
Q
Buber and his horse
Reflexion
A
Basically, Buber experienced the other wholly and without holding himself back
- “When I stroked the mighty mane, sometimes marvellously smooth-combed, at other times just as astonishingly wild, and felt the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself.
- The horse would flick its ears, raise its head, snort quietly which Burber describes as signals of a “fellow-conspirator”
- However, once Buber became very conscious of his hand and the fun he got from the stroking, and “it was no longer the same thing. The next day, after giving him a rich feed, when I stroked my friend’s head he did not raise his head.”
- The basic I-Thou mode is “dialogue”, but when Buber became conscious of the pleasure of the stroking, the dialogue vanished and the “monologue” and the I-It reigned
Buber termed this turning away “reflexion”
- “When one is not only ‘concerned with himself’ but one forgets about the particular being of the other”
20
Q
Pure present
A
Buber stressed that though the I-Thou constituted an ideal toward which one should strive, nonetheless it existed only in rare moments
- One has to live primarily in the I-It world, living solely in the “Thou” would result in one’s burning oneself up in the white flame of the “Thou”
- “One cannot live in the pure present [that is, in the I-Thou], it would consume us. /…/ Without it a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human.”
21
Q
Buber’s dream
A
Yalom says that since Buber’s human exists “in the in-between” then Buber did not have any place for existential isolation and would protest to Yalom’s positioning. However, Yalom wants to observe a dream of Buber’s
- In this dream Buber “finds himself alive in a vast cave, or a mud building, or on the fringes of a gigantic forest whose like I cannot remember having seen”
- Then something extraordinary occurs, e.g. an animal tearing the flesh from his arm
- “I cry out… Each time it is the same cry, inarticulate but in strict rhythm, rising and falling, swelling to a fullness which my throat could not endure were I awake, long and slow, a cry that is a song. When it ends my heart stops beating. But then, somewhere, far away, another cry mourns toward me, another which is the same, the same cry uttered or sung by another voice.”
- The responding cry is the critical event for Buber: “As the reply ends, a certitude, true dream certitude comes to me that now it has happened. Nothing more. /…/ It means that the happening which gave rise to my cry has only now, with the rejoinder, really and undoubtedly happened.”
- Buber argued that existence begins with the appearance of the relationship, the responding cry.
Yalom: “Yet there’s a different interpretation: one begins, not in relationship, but alone and in an uncanny place. One is attacked and frightened. /…/ The dream speaks to me of fundamental isolation and suggests that our existence begins with a solitary, lonely cry, anxiously awaiting a response.”
22
Q
Abraham Maslow
A
Yalom: “More than any other, he must be regarded as the progenitor of humanistic psychology, a field which overlaps existential psychology in many points.”
One of Maslow’s basic propositions was that individual’s basic motivation is either “deficit” or “growth”
- Psychoneurosis is a deficiency disease resulting from a lack of fulfillment, early in life, of basic “needs” - safety, belongingness, identification, love, respect, prestige
- Individuals who have these satisfied are growth-oriented
- Growth-oriented is less dependent, less beholden, less needful of praise, less anxious for honors, prestige and rewards
- He does not require continual interpersonal gratification and may actually often feel hampered by others and prefer privacy
- Does not relate to others as sources of supply but as complex, unique, whole beings
- Deficiency-oriented relates to others from the point of usefulness
- Love is transformed into something else and resembles our relationships with “cows, horses and sheep as well as with waiters, taxi drivers, porters, policemen, and others we use”
23
Q
D-love & B-love
A
D-love (deficient love)
- D-love: “selfish” or “love need”
- Can be gratified
B-love (being live): “unneeding” “unselfish”
- “Gratification” hardly applies to it at all
- B-lovers are more independent of each other, more autonomous, less jealous or threatened, less needful, more disinterested
- but also simultaneously more eager to help the other towards self-actualization, more proud of the other’s triumphs, more altruistic, generous, fostering
- In a profound sense, creates the partner, provides self-acceptance and a feeling of love-worthiness
24
Q
Erich Fromm
A
It is striking that Buber, Maslow and Fromm, each from a different perspective - theology-philosophy, experimental and social psychology, and psychoanalysis - arrived at similar conclusions.
Fromm’s starting point is that the human’s most fundamental concern is existential isolation; that the awareness of separateness is “the source of all anxiety”
- Fromm discusses several historical attempts of solving separateness:
- Creative activity - union of artist with material and product
- Orgiastic states - religious, sexual, drug-induced
- Conformity - with customs and beliefs of a group
- All of these attempts fall short:
- “The unity in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is not transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love.”
Yalom: “I assume that by ‘full answer’ Fromm meant the ‘most satisfactory’ answer. Love doesn’t take away our separateness, but is the best way of coping with the pain of separateness.”
- Buber assumed that a state of love was the human’s natural state in existence, and that isolation was a fallen state
- Maslow regarded love both as one of the innate human needs and potentials
- Fromm considered love as a mode of coping “an answer to the problem of existence” - a view close to my position in this book (Yalom)
25
"Symbiotic union" vs "mature love"
Fromm differentiated “symbiotic union” from “mature love”
Symbiotic love consisting of an active (sadism) and a passive (masochism) form, is a state of fusion where neither party is whole or free
- “Infantile love follows the principle ‘I love because I am loved’”
- “‘Immature love says ‘I love you because I need you’”
Mature love is “union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality… In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”
- “Mature love follows the principle ‘I am loved because I love’”
- “Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you’”
26
Love is an active process
Fromm’s point that love is an active, not passive, process has extraordinary importance for the clinician
- Patients complain of loneliness, of being unloved and unlovable, but the productive work is always to be done in the opposite realm: their inability to love
- Love is a positive act, not a passive affect
- It is giving not receiving, a “standing in” not “falling for”
- Distinction between “giving” and “depleting”: a person with a hoarding, receptive, or an exploitative orientation will feel depleted and impoverished by giving
- But for a mature “productive” person, giving is an expression of strength and abundance
- “When one gives, he brings something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him; in truly giving, he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him. Giving makes the other person a giver also, and they both share in the joy of what they have brought to life.”
In addition to giving, mature love implies other basic elements: concern, responsivity, respect, and knowledge.
- Love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another
- One must be responsive to the needs of the other
- One must respect the uniqueness of the other, to see them as they are, and to help them grown and unfold in their own ways, for their own sake
- True knowledge of the other is possible only when one transcends one’s self-concern and sees the other person in the other’s own terms
- One needs to listen and to experience emphatically: one needs to enter and become familiar with the private world of the other, to live in the other’s life and sense the other’s meanings and experiences
27
Love as an attitude
40 year old: leave my kids and wife
It is important to the clinician to think of love as “attitude” rather than in terms of the lover’s relationship to his or her love “object”
- Too often we make the mistake of considering exclusive attachment to one person as proof of the intensity and purity of the love
- But such love, in the absence of caring of others, is invariably destined to cave in on itself
A 40 year old once consulted me because he had fallen in love with a woman and was not sure whether to leave his wife and children
- He was angry that Yalom didn’t offer him a systematic well-planned course of action
- Soon this criticism led us into his highly judgemental attitude toward people in general - his lack of love toward his world at large
- Therapy proved of benefit to him by focusing, as effective therapy generally does, on the unexpected
28
Brotherly love
The most fundamental type of love according to Fromm is brotherly love: an experience of union with all individuals which is characterized by its very lack of exclusivity.
- The Bible stresses that the object of love should be the frail, the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger
- These do not serve a function for us and to love them is to love in a need-less fashion
29
How is it possible to relate to another in a need-less fashion? (8)
1. To care for another means to relate in a self-less way:
- letting go of self-consciousness and self-awareness;
- No “what does he think of me?” or “what’s in it for me?”
- One does not look for praise, adoration, sexual release, power, money
- One relates in the moment solely to the other person: without a third party (real or imagined) observing the encounter
- If part of oneself is elsewhere - e.g. studying the effect that the relationship will have on some third person - then to that extent one has failed to relate
2. To care for another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible
- Selflessly, one is free to experience all parts of the other than the part that serves some utilitarian purpose
- One extends oneself into the other, recognizing the other as a sentient being who has also constituted a world about themselves
3. To care for another means to care about the being and the growth of the other
- Gleaned from genuine listening, one endeavors to help the other become fully alive in the moment of encounter
4. Caring is active: mature love is loving, not being loved.
- One gives lovingly to the other; one does not “fall for” the other
5. Caring is one’s way of being in the world
- It is not an exclusive, elusive magical connection with one particular person
6. Mature caring flows out of one’s richness, not out of one’s poverty - out of growth, not out of need
- One does not need love because one needs the other to exist, to be whole, to escape overwhelming loneliness
- One who loves has met these needs at other times, in other ways, not the least of which was the maternal love which flowed toward one in the early phases of life
- Past loving is the source of strength, current loving is the result of strength
7. Caring is reciprocal
- To the extent one truly “turns toward the other”, one is altered
- To the extent one brings the other to life, one becomes more fully alive
8. Mature caring is not without its rewards
- One is altered, one is enriched, one is fulfilled, one’s existential loneliness is attenuated
- Through caring one is cared for
- Yet these rewards flow from genuine caring, they do not instigate it
- Frankl: “The rewards ensue but cannot be pursued.”
30
Existential Isolation and Interpersonal Psychopathology
Kierkegaard on despair
If we fail to develop the inner strength to face existential isolation, to say “so be it” and to take anxiety into ourselves, then we will struggle in oblique ways to find safety
- For the most part the challenges are relational, but as we shall see, in each instance the individual does not relate to the other but instead uses the other for a function
- The terror, the direct awareness of existential isolation, and the psychic defense structure that we elaborate to assuage anxiety are all unconscious
- One knows only that one cannot be alone, that one desperately wants from others something that one is never able to obtain, and that something always goes wrong with relationships
Yet another solution lies in the direction of sacrificing selfhood: one gains relief from isolation anxiety through immersion in some other individual, cause, or pursuit.
- Kierkegaard: “Individuals are in despair twice: first, in a fundamental existential despair, and second, further in despair because, having sacrificed self-awareness, they do not even know they are in despair.”
31
EXISTING IN THE EYES OF OTHERS
“The worst thing about being alone is that at that moment, no one in the world may be thinking about me.”
Other members of the therapy group agreed to this when one member said this.
- “I’d rather be dead than alone.” - 19 year old who cut her wrists after romantic breakup
- “I don’t exist when I’m alone” woman in a highly unsatisfying relationship
- The same dynamic speaks in the child’s incessant plea “Watch me”, “Look at me” - the presence of the other is required to make reality real
PS! “I cite the child’s experience as anterior manifestation, not as the cause of an underlying conflict.”
32
Searching for love
Misidentification of the problem
By searching for love, the neurotic individual flees from the dimly recognized sense of isolation and hollowness at the center of being
- Their relationship generally fails because the other in time wearies of affirming the existence of the individual
- Further, the other senses that they are not being loved but needed
- The other never feels wholly known and wholly embraced because the individual relates only to a part - the part that serves the function of affirming his or her existence
- Stopgap: if one cannot affirm oneself, then one continually needs affirmation by the other
- One is distracted permanently from facing one’s fundamental isolation
- Misidentification of the problem: one considers it to be that one is unloved, whereas in actuality it is that one is unable to love
- Loving is more difficult than being loved
33
Socket and Prong
When one’s primary motivine in engaging others is to ward of loneliness then one has transformed the other into equipment
- Not infrequently two individuals will each serve each other’s primary function and like socket and prong, fit snugly together
- Their relationship may be mutually functional that it remains stable - yet such an arrangement cannot help but be growth-stunting, since each partner is known and knows the other in only a partial manner
- Remove one partner (or strengthen one in psychotherapy) and the other falls
34
Not-being-loved vs Not loving
A 35 year old patient was plagued by the vision of “eating alone at 63”
- Though an attractive woman, one man after the other met her and after a short encounter broke off the relationship - driven away by the intensity and the desperation of her love-need and by an awareness that she had little love to give
- An important clue to an understanding of her dynamics was to be found in her other interpersonal relationships: highly judgmentally she dismissed all those who were not potential mates
- When treating a patient who has difficulty establishing an enduring relationship, it is always rewarding for the therapist to inquire deeply about the texture of the patient’s other, less intense relationships
- Love problems are not situation-specific. Love is not a specific encounter but an attitude.
- A problem of not-being-loved is more often than not a problem of not loving.
35
Charles in response to Dave
Charles, the cancer guy who was brought to a group of everyday patients
- One guy Dave announced in the group that due to work he would have to be away from the group for several months
- Everyone expressed negative emotions, except for Charles
- “Why?” “Why?” “Why?”
- Eventually it turned out that Charles had received news that his cancer has been retreating
- When further questioned about this, Charles said a remarkable thing:
- “Now that my cancer is getting better, I suddenly find that I don’t want to meet people any longer and I find myself withdrawing.”
36
FUSION: Universal conflict
Fusion-oriented individuals
“Universal conflict”: one strives to be an individual and yet being an individual requires that one endure a frightening isolation.
- Most common mode of dealing is denial: elaborating a delusion of fusion, “I am not alone, I am part of others”
Fusion-oriented individuals are generally labeled “dependent”
- They live for the “dominant” other
- They submerge their own needs, seek to find out what others wish and make those wishes their own
- Above all they wish to avoid offense
Kaiser:
- Their behavior seems to suggest: “Do not take me seriously. I do not belong to the category of adults and cannot be counted as such.”
- They are playful but not like someone who likes to play, but like someone who does not want to appear serious and matter of fact.
- Achievements and successes are put in a ridiculous light
- Talk might appear chopped up by quick transitionless shifts in topic
- By blurting out naive questions or baby talking they indicate that they want to be put into the category “non-adult”
37
Transvestism
Rob’s fantasies while cross-dressing were about imagining going up to a group of women who would welcome him to the company and consider him one of them
- He was too afraid of males to develop relationships with them
- Too fearful of rejection to approach females
- During therapy group his desire for merging was clear - he was docile, obsequious, pleading for attention
- His insight from therapy: “I’m neither here nor there, neither man nor woman, isolated from everybody”
- At first his insight led to increased cross-dressing
- Then he learned social skills to relate to group members and then to individuals in his life environment, leading to the end of his transvestite desires
38
Ultimate rescuer vs fusion - impetus and goal
Ultimate rescuer: death anxiety and the search for a powerful intercessor
Fusion: isolation anxiety and the search of ego boundary dissolution
Fusion eliminates isolation by eliminating self-awareness: the individual cannot even say “I have lost my sense of self” because there is in fusion no separate “I” to say that
- To lose self-consciousness is comforting; Kierkegaard: “With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness, the more intense the despair.”
39
Fuse with a “thing”
Mysticism
One may also fuse with a “thing” - a group, a cause, a country, a project
- To be like everyone else saves one from the isolation of selfhood
- The conforming-fusion solution to isolation is undermined by the questions: What do I want? What do I feel? What is my goal in life? What do I have in me to express and fulfill?
- Jonestown: identification with the group offered the members a haven from the fear of isolated existence - a product so valuable that they were willing to sacrifice everything for it - worldly goods, family, friends, country, lives
Mysticism, which involves heightened marvelous moments of oneness with the universe is also an instance of ego loss
- Fusion with another individual, with group or cause, with nature or with the universe always involves a loss of self - it is a pact with Satan and eventuates in existential guilt of living an unlived life
40
Sadism (and masochism)
They are often solutions to the same problem of isolation
The fusion-seeking individual who is self-sacrificing, who will bear pain, who in fact enjoys pain because it dispels solitude can also become one who seeks to dominate the other, to humiliate the other, to inflict pain, to make oneself the absolute master over the other
- One seeks security by being swallowed by another, the other by swallowing someone else
- Either losing one’s separateness and isolation or enlarging oneself by the incorporation of others
41
SEX AND ISOLATION
Compulsive sexuality
Sex may be used in the service of repression of death anxiety
- Several patients with metastatic cancer who seemed obsessed with sexual concerns
- Married couples, one of whom had cancer, who spoke of little else except their sexual maladjustment that Yalom would sometimes forget that one of them is dying - so powerful is this defense
- In ch 5 Yalom described a woman whose cancer seemed not to decrease the amount of male suitors but actually increase their numbers and desires
- Ellen Greenspan found that women with severe breast cancer had a higher incidence of illicit sexual fantasies
Something gloriously magic about the lure of sex
- We are “captured”, drive, enchanted, we “fall for”
- We can resist the lure, delay it, or give in to it, but we have no sense of “choosing” or “creating” our sexuality
- It feels outside of us, it has a force of its own and seems “bigger than life”
- Sexually compulsive individuals report, as they get better, a sense of bleakness about their lives: “is this all there is?”
Compulsive sexuality is a common response to a sense of isolation
- Caricature of a relationship which breaks all rules of true caring
- The other is used as equipment
- The sexually compulsive individual is an example of one who does not relate to the whole being of the other, only to the part in need (“stud”, “piece of ass” etc.)
Above all, sexually compulsive individuals don’t know their partners
- It’s often actually to their advantage not to know the other and to keep most of themselves hidden
- They only show and look for what’s needed for seduction and the act
The sexually compulsive individual neither knows or engages the other
- He never concerns himself with the other’s growth
- He does not exist “between” but always observes himself - Buber named this “reflexion” and bemoaned a relation where the partners do not engage in a full authentic dialogue but live in a world of monologue, a world of mirroring
42
Is there no place for sex as an act of uncommitted adult play?
Yalom: “These questions are to a large extent ethical and moral, outside of therapist’s expertise.”
- However, “the therapist can say something if a person relates to another only in a partial, function-oriented manner”
- Not only is rigid, exclusive sexual behavior indicative of deeper pathology, but such behavior cannot help but result in a sense of self-contempt and existential guilt
- Kierkegaard, “Diary of a Seducer”, seducer seduces young girl but his life becomes empty and spirit impoverished
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Buber's varieties of "erotic man"
Bruce's dreams
“There a lover stamps around and is in love only with his passion”
“There one is wearing his differentiated feelings like medal-ribbons”
“There one is enjoying the adventures of his own fascinating effect”
“There one is gazing enraptured at the spectacle of his own supposed surrender”
“There one is collecting excitement”
“There one is displaying his ‘power’”
“There one is preening himself with borrowed vitality”
“There one is delighting to exist simultaneously as himself and as an idol very unlike himself”
“There one is warming himself at the blaze of what has fallen to his lot”
Bruce was the patient of Yalom’s like this
- Through therapy he started asking questions like “If I don’t screw women, what do I do with them?” “And what do I do with men?” “What are people for anyway?”
Bruce’s dreams:
- Trying to fuck his son but finding no vagina (meaning: struggling to engage in another way than sexually)
- Playing tennis with woman but above the net the ball always bounced back to him (meaning: presumably engaging someone else in tennis but in fact only relating to himself)
- Bragging to Paul about money
(meaning: could not relate to men except in a competitive fashion)
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The Other as Elevator
Barry was an engineer, 35, cold and stiff, looking for love
- His goal was to “get in touch” with his feelings
- Barry met Jamelia whom he found very attractive, BUT:
- She was not sufficiently articulate
- Too inhibited
- Too socially introverted
- Barry was hoping to find someone who he could learn from and would offer him a less restricted social life -- the other became equipment!
- Barry often talked about “search” - a key understanding of his problem
- “One, after all, does not find a relationship, one forms a relationship.”
- Not only did Barry see Jamelia as an “it”, but viewed the relationship as static and inorganic - an entity that was there almost fully formed from the beginning
Buber reminds us that in a genuine organic relationship there is reciprocity
- There is no unchanging I observing the other
- The I in the encounter is altered, and the other, the Thou, is altered as well
Barry always had immense anxiety when having to call up a woman
- Behavioral therapy wasn’t successful
- Yalom and him looking at another obvious vantage point: competition with other men and fear of rejection also did not work
- There was considerable progress when we explored the ways that Barry used, or wished to use, the other: at a deep level Barry knew that he was not encountering the other but violating the other - he did not want her but something from her
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How Many People are in the Room?
Paul and Peter hanging out:
1. There’s Peter as he wishes to appear to Paul and Paul as he wishes to appear to Peter
2. There’s Paul’s image of Peter and Peter’s image of Paul
3. There’s Peter as he appears to himself and Paul as he appears to himself
4. Lastly, there are the bodily Peter and bodily Paul
Two living beings and six ghostly appearances - Where is there room for any genuine interhuman life?
In therapy with a patient, Yalom often asks himself “How many people are in the room?”
- Is he thinking of how clever he will sound when he presents this patient at a conference?
- Is he thinking of the interesting “clinical material” which he can use to communicate with his readers?
- He poses the same question to the patient: is the patient relating to Yalom or some ghostly figures from the past?
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Camus in "A Happy Death"
“What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men’s eyes turned towards her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he had loved in her was his power and his ambition to live.”
Yalom: “There were never two people in the relationship - he related not to Marthe but to others through Marthe.”
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Bad faith:
Karl
Ron "The Saviour"
“Bad faith” mode of relating to others is so common that examples bound in everyday life and therapy
Karl was with a new girlfriend when the previous one called demanding a lot of things from him.
- Instead of listening, Karl held up the phone to the new girlfriend, so that she too could hear
- Karl’s new girlfriend was deeply troubled, she suspected (and rightly so) that the telephone episode was an ominous sign of her future relationship with him
Group therapy makes things especially transparent: Ron the saviour
- Ron was in a group and started extra-group friendships with every one of the members to go skiing, sailing, to dinner and became romantically involved with one of them (Irene)
- In one session he invited the female co-therapist for a skiing weekend
. The invitation was examined with the group and he left the session confused and shaken
- On the way home he remembered that his favourite childhood story had been Robin Hood; he went to a bookstore to read it
- What he loved about Robin Hood was the rescuing of individuals, especially women, from tyrants
- That motif had played a powerful role in his life, beginning with his family
- He had also started a successful business by first working for someone and then starting the same service as a competitor and enticing the ex-boss’s employees to work for him
- He also married his wife not so much because of love but to rescue her from a tyrannical father
- Similarly the pattern unfolded in the group
- Other members expressed dismay for being mere pawns in Ron’s struggle with Yalom
- He eventually got to the same question as Bruce “What else are people for?”
- He worked on his relationships, however, he didn’t leave Irene until a couple of months after both he and Irene had ended the group therapy: without the tyrant in the picture, Ron’s love waned quickly
