Western And Eastern Approaches To Working With Emotions

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The traditional dichotomy of Western and Eastern ways of working with emotional states reflects important methodological aspects of psychotherapeutic practice. It is no secret that one of the strong points of almost any Western psychotherapeutic trend is the concept of mindfulness, which came directly from Eastern traditions. However, Western and Eastern practitioners, in my opinion, understand this category of experience differently. Let's try to answer the question, can the Eastern understanding of mindfulness expand the use of this rather worn-out concept in psychotherapeutic practice?

Let's start our presentation of this topic from afar and ask ourselves the question of whether a person has free will? Is a person a part of the physical world, which obeys the laws of cause and effect, or, due to the presence of his consciousness, he goes into the zone of action of other laws? Can we, on the basis of the sum of his previous actions, predict the direction of subsequent ones? In order not to dive into a large-scale discussion of this huge topic, I will voice my own conclusion, which can be challenged.

It seems to me that if we move from the field of philosophy to the field of psychology, then the following conceptual landscape appears before us. On the one hand, our behavior is predetermined by all previous experience, which forms a phenomenal model of ourselves, within which we are forced to act. Each of us has an unconscious experience that reveals the true motives of behavior, and we are just serving the decisions made on this stage. On the other hand, we have a moral responsibility for how the truth presented in the unconscious will manifest in our experience - through the return of the repressed in the form of reservations, resistance, self-harma, or directly, through acceptance and awareness. In other words, we are responsible for that area of the unconscious that determines our behavior - are we ready to accept the truth about ourselves or will we discard it like some kind of psychic boomerang with a great chance of getting an unexpected blow in the back of the head?

In psychology, there is the concept of fusion - it is a psychic defense mechanism that does not allow answering the question of what needs an individual has at the moment. Let's supplement the idea of merging with one more description. The unconscious laws, according to which our model of reality is formed, is initially absolutely transparent for the Ego. We cannot spontaneously separate the shape from the background. Very simplistic - if it seems that there are only idiots around, it is very difficult to detect your own anger behind this. To do this, you need to do a lot of mental work. This is another form of merging - when a person merges with his model of reality and considers it to be the only possible one.

Then, returning to the previous thesis, we can say that a person in fusion does not initially have moral responsibility for his actions - they are all dictated by the model of the world that the unconscious broadcasts to him. In order to have responsibility, that is, the opportunity to make a choice, a person in the mental apparatus must be presented with representations of different possibilities. And for this it is necessary to get out of the merger, or at least to suspect that the world around is much wider than my own ideas about it. In other words, the personality is responsible for what exactly will determine its behavior.

At this point we come to where our text began. Western and Eastern practitioners offer completely different approaches to strategies for exiting a merger.

I will describe the western path very briefly, only in order to substantiate its fundamental difference from the eastern one. But for this we will again have to take a step aside and say a few words about what are the basic ideas about the emotional sphere in the framework of modern psychotherapy. For example, an emotion can be seen as the result of a stopped action. If a certain amount of time passes from the moment the need arises to its satisfaction, then in response to this, some kind of emotional state arises. If the need is satisfied immediately, then it causes more bodily sensations than an emotional reaction. One can go further and say that emotion is an action placed inward. In this sense, emotions give the development of thinking. Thinking in the beginning was a motor act. Remember the famous game of Freud's grandson with the reel, during which he performed an action that affirms absence and presence. Thus, emotions use intentionality to connect the inner world with the actions that we perform outside. And since emotions are paused movements, their greatest danger is that they involve the individual in the experience. Emotions are like a rabbit hole that ends at the very center of the subjective model of the world. Merging begins with the fact that we are captured by emotional states and take possession of us entirely.

What does the Western approach offer in relation to the exit from the merger? The Western approach suggests going forward into experiencing emotions. It is no coincidence that in the psychoanalytic tradition, the main space of therapy has become the space of transference - that is, the actualization in relations with the analyst of various incomplete, that is, not lived experiences. It was proposed to mentally process these experiences, that is, to explore, to increase tolerance, to give meanings, and so on. Stopping the natural process of experiencing within the framework of the Western approach is considered as a state of mental trauma - some emotions turn out to be unbearable for the psyche and therefore they are processed unconsciously, with the help of protective mechanisms. Accordingly, the Western approach sets itself the task of moving the actual content of experience into the conscious area, thereby increasing the subject's knowledge of himself. In other words, for the emotional state to “let go,” it must be exhausted.

What does this have to do with the merge? If we use the metaphor of moderate solipsism that the world around us is our mental projection (and from a neurophysiological point of view it is), then the result of observation depends very much on the state of the place from which we are looking. If we are in a state of pronounced fear, experience tension due to the impossibility of experiencing pain or despair, or faint at the thought of impending loneliness, then it is very difficult for us to see a world filled with other possibilities. When I come out of merging with my trauma, it allows me to start contacting other parts of myself that are responsible not only for survival, but also for attachment, freedom, and so on. For moral responsibility, as mentioned above, it is necessary to represent different possibilities. Coming out of the merger through conscious living, we find ourselves at a different point to start.

In philosophical debates about free will under determinism, the argument of luck or chance comes to the rescue. In chaos theory, the behavior of complex systems is determined by many reasons, for each of which it is impossible to accurately establish its own contribution to the changes in the system. Chance is what creates a break in the chain of cause and effect. It can be assumed that awareness turns out to be such a case in the system of conditioning our behavior by merging with the model of reality. Awareness introduces an element of chaos into the established coordinate system and changes the starting point from which the effect will begin. If we recall Lucretius, then it becomes clear that chance must be inscribed in the logic of determinism as an event, thanks to which development becomes possible. Chance does not contradict causality, it breaks its flow and in place of this gaping, or rather the seam between cause and effect, a new version of events appears. When a person has the opportunity to plunge into awareness, his future for some time again becomes foggy and unpredictable.

Awareness allows not to find the supposedly existing cause of the present state, but to establish the reason for the next state. To establish here and now, that is, to get out of the grip of determinism. Understanding randomness in the context of mental experience poses another problem - it seems that along with randomness, the category of meaninglessness also becomes apparent. After all, if development depends on the case, then there is no pattern, inherent logic and meaning in this. Moreover, speaking about development, we implicitly mean by development only complication and striving for a certain potential ideal - chance breaks the idea of the end point of evolution to smithereens. Freud, by the way, at one time abandoned the idea of the progressive and inevitable development of the personality. It seems that the notion of the necessity of chance for the formation of psychic reality introduces new coordinates into our understanding of subjectivity. In the logic of late Freud, the death drive manifests itself as an endless repetition of something already realized, that is, once determined. Chance introduces the necessary novelty into this endless repetition, and it is on this that transference therapy is based - everything is repeated, but each time it happens in a new way. Thus, fusion is something that must be overcome by chance, which is released by awareness.

The Eastern approach is much more difficult to describe, since I have very little experience in researching it and, rather, I will try to outline its main points. If, according to Leonid Tretyak's apt expression, psychotherapy assumes that the client's nightmare must be watched to the end, then in Eastern practices the ability not to start watching it at all is important. That is, if in the western approach it is necessary to take a step forward, in experiences, then in the eastern - the direction will be the opposite - away from them. What, then, can be found there, if experiences, from the standpoint of Western psychology, are the main way of gaining experience?

Eastern traditions also describe emotional experiences through the category of fusion. In this fusion, the observer, as an agent who registers the experience taking place with him, merges with the object of observation and, moreover, becomes it himself, without having his own constant nature. Meditative experience suggests that consciousness thinks thoughts mainly in order to take their form - at the moment when thoughts stop, the subject experiences anxiety, since it is difficult for him to answer the question of who he is. Any activity, including mental activity, is necessary first of all to give form to experiences, since it is in them that the subject has a sense of himself. The difference between the western and eastern approaches, therefore, finds a fundamental difference in what is the support for the subject. In the first, in order to feel alive, it is necessary to identify with the experienced experience, in the second, to find oneself as an observer of this experience, which is suspended in emptiness and relies only on the very fact of its presence.

There is an interesting paradox here. On the one hand, we need thinking as a source of those pictures that are shown to the observer. If thinking, as a form of hallucinatory activity, is not developed, the subject is immersed in the world of the operative functioning of an automaton, which has no inner world at all. In this mechanism, the desire always coincides with the demand that it expresses outside and it has nothing to support the lack that pushes it to plunge into the maelstrom of imaginary images. On the other hand, identification with these pictures may turn out to be so strong that disidentification with them will cause intense anxiety of non-being, that is, it will simply be impossible.

The Western and Eastern approaches converge on a goal, which they achieve in different ways. In the general case, this goal is formulated as follows - to make the subject more free in relation to the choice, which he most often makes unconsciously and thereby loses free will. An unconscious choice is a response that is made in order not to fall into the zone of difficult experiences. Difficult, because the person does not have a clear and complete experience of their living. For example, rescue can be included as a way not to face the anxiety of loneliness and self-uselessness (now there was a very free interpretation). The task of the Eastern approach, within the framework of such a view, is the development of the ability to observe a difficult experience as some event in mental life from a certain distance, that is, without being involved in its immediate correction.

Pyatigorskiy and Mamardashvili introduce an interesting concept in one of their works, which they called “the struggle with consciousness”. In a literal sense, it means the following - the enemy of the human race is not the unconscious, which supposedly opposes conscious experience, but the automatic and habitual consciousness; consciousness without any effort; consciousness, the course of which is predetermined by some previous circumstances. Therefore, it is very important to overcome the inertia of consciousness, which is also incompatible with the concept of free will. For my part, I will assume that for this it is necessary to do one very simple methodologically, but very difficult technically, thing - not just to do something, but to place this action in the focus of attention. This reversal allows you to carry out actions not with objects, but at the same time change something in yourself. That is, to create second-order thinking. The Eastern approach suggests doing this action in relation to your own emotional experience or even the very process of thinking.

The thought of an object gives positive knowledge, can the thought itself become an object for its consideration from the position of another place of observation? For example, we think "this apple is green" and the apple will be the object of thought. The example is more complicated - we think "thought is a way of reflecting objective reality" and nothing changes here - not the thought itself becomes the object of thought, but the symbol that denotes it. Here it is important to make the object of observation the very thought that thinks about the thought. If an object arises in the space of thought, then the thought itself also arises, let us resort to Buddhist terminology, in the space of the mind. But in order for space to arise, it is necessary to take a special observation position. If we are inside thought, then the space of the mind does not appear, because in order for it to arise, it is necessary to be outside of thought. That is, to observe it as an object. The space of the mind appears (or we appear in it) when objects and distances between them appear.

When we think a thought, we do not notice it and therefore we can even say that at this moment the thought rather thinks us, since the distance between me and the thought is reduced to a minimum. The difference between these two positions - inside the thought and outside it - is determined by the quality of the presence in the experience. The first position emphasizes the inevitable dichotomy between object and subject - between the object of thought and the one who thinks about it. In the second, this dichotomy is overcome - thought as an object does not become an object, since the space of the mind is a conditional subject that includes all objects and thereby overcomes this opposition.

The difference between these positions is felt in the same way as presence differs from the thought "I am present", which thereby ceases presence as a phenomenon of mental life.

Thought observation is very similar to a situation in which a hunter is tracking a beast; the difficulty lies in the fact that from time to time the hunter becomes the beast he hunts for. If you do not try to take the position of an observer, there is a chance to run all your life in animal skin, without giving yourself any account of this.

So, summarizing these brief sketches, we can say that the Eastern approach enriches traditional Western psychotherapy with a very important meta-skill - the ability to be not only a user of the psychic reality that we inherited, but a researcher able to find reference points in some other ontology, ontology of the observer. In other words, the Eastern approach allows you to go beyond the system that determines the behavior and, thereby, change it, introducing something new into it. When Buddhists say that the ego has no nature of its own, this does not mean that the ego disappears - it just ceases to be the main reference point.