Integral Education: The CIIS Blog

Energy Sources as Mythologies

By CRAIG CHALQUIST, who will be taking over as department chair of East-West Psychology in January 2013. Craig teaches mythology, depth psychology, and ecopsychology at CIIS.

When we talk about how to power our civilization we seldom look at the mythic images involved. Yet C.G. Jung, Karl Kerényi, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Edith Hamilton, and Joseph Campbell all insisted that myths are not just archaic theories for what science has now explained.

Rather, myths make visible the underside of a culture just as dreams make visible the life going on in the personal unconscious. That is why myths never die, they only get reinvented: the zombies of old not given up by the civilized mind, but shambling along looking like half-dead banks full of toxic assets; the Golem reinvented as the robot; Merlin’s wand molded into the smartphone; the figure of the giant now the world-girdling transnational corporation; the bursting cosmic egg of many mythologies referred to now as the Big Bang. As Campbell’s famous statement from The Hero with a Thousand Faces tells us, “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”

What mythic images confront us in the debate about clean versus dirty energy?

It took our planet billions of years to remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to allow life to take hold and grow here. By contrast, the extractive energy industries--especially coal and petroleum--reverse that great cycle of evolution. Little wonder that mythic images of the Underworld, including the Christian Hell, always follow extractive operations. Entire decapitated mountain ranges in Appalachia now resemble something out of Dante’s Inferno. The Cuyahoga River has burned thirteen times because of oil spills: our version of Phlegethon, the flaming river in ancient Greek mythology.

Oil and coal are dark, poisonous, and dangerous to mine and to manipulate. It’s breathtaking to imagine internal combustion imagistically: an entire civilization powered by inner explosions whose smothering byproducts make the atmosphere dim and feverish. Pluto may have been downgraded as a planet, but he is alive and powerful here on Earth: Pluto, deadly god of hidden wealth and root of the word “plutocracy.”

By contrast, images of abundance follow solar, wind, and water power. Enough sunlight falls on Earth in an hour to power everything for a year. Generous sunlight, unceasing wind, rippling waves bring organic images of bounty and flow, cycle and season. The installations that catch their energies without fracking up the biosphere do not explode like oil refineries do. Troops are not dispatched to foreign lands to fight for sunlight, wind, or wave, nor are financial empires built on the hydraulic despotism of monopolizing these free resources.

The gods of extraction are dark, hidden, or fiery deities, but those of alternative energy move freely across the sea and sky without regard for archaic national borders or destructive political alignments.

The question of which energy sources to rely on, then, is also a question of which mythic images we favor: the dangerous and lethal, or the abundant and natural? The confined and hidden or the bright and free? At the gas pump we pay homage to Pluto and Mars, but how might we shift our allegiance to Helios and Gaia?

CIIS’ Integrative Psychodynamic Approach and Clinical Treatment

By LELAND VAN DEN DAELE, PhD, ABPP, professor in the Clinical Psychology Department at CIIS. Leland is a Life Member of the American Psychological Association, a member of the Editorial Board of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Research Director of Psychodiagnostics. He publishes his own blog.

Since its inception, the CIIS Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program was inspired by the philosophical and psychological writings of Alan Watts and Haridas Chadhuri. Watts was the Dean of the Institute for Asian Studies, the progenitor of CIIS, and Chadhuri was the first president of CIIS. Both Watts and Chadhuri emphasized that psychological health depended upon the whole person: body, mind, and spirit.

The interdependence of body, mind, and spirit find validation in contemporary science. Biochemistry and clinical nutrition have demonstrated numerous links among diet, neurotransmitters, mood, and behavior. Wide-ranging cognitive and behavioral effects have been established for exercise and sleep. The scientific study of practices associated with yoga, tai chi, and Buddhism have entered the main stream. As a rule, results validate traditional wisdom as a foundation for equanimity, and physical and mental health.

Cognitive neuroscience employing electroencephalograph (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies further provide a window into the inner world. If changes in the brain and the mind are interdependent, as is widely taken as axiomatic, then changes in EEG and MRI patterns reflect changes in mental activity. The use of these technologies demonstrates the pervasive influence of unconscious factors on attention, awareness, and cognition. Subtle emotion, the material and social context, abstract purpose, belief, personal history, and a host of other variables individually and collectively influence the flow of consciousness, cognition, and choice. Consciousness, cognition, and choice arise in a multidimensional field. Multiple strata from the biochemical and cellular to the energetic level participate to form conscious content.

A different approach is embodied in reductive approaches to psychology, which attempt to isolate a single factor that influences mind and behavior. The statistical method associated with reductive approaches requires the observer to “sum across” individuals. The method necessarily focuses upon one or a few variables isolated from the totality of an individual’s life. Indeed, the individual ceases to exist, replaced by numbers on a scale, which define only a “variable” on a scale and not the individual in her complexity.

As a result, symptom-oriented treatments typically employ a protocol, a kind of “one-size-fits-all” set of exercises or formulations, meant to apply to persons described by the protocol. Reductive approaches fail to address the person or provide individualized understanding how she finds herself in her current life situation. Instead, the person is given a formula.

This contrasts with CIIS’s integrative psychodynamic approach to clinical psychology. Body, mind, and spirit are viewed in dynamic relationship. Symptoms are not isolated from the whole human being and her social and emotional context. CIIS’s integrative psychodynamic approach aims at positive psychological health, not just the elimination of this or that symptom.

Integrative psychodynamic psychotherapy entails growth of experience, knowledge, and insight into the multidimensional nature of self, other, and world. The approach does not entail “quick fixes” or formula. It recognizes the complexity of individual differences, human relations, and life. The successful application of integrative psychodynamic psychotherapy eventuates in new openness to the inner and outer world. The positive psychological health that results is more than the absence of symptoms. It entails heightened empathy, sensitivity, and maturity. As integrative psychodynamic psychotherapy opens experience of the self, it opens experience to life.

Looking to Alice Walker

By MELVINA HAYES

This post was written as an assignment for professor Brynn Saito's multi-genre MFA-level writing workshop, WRC 7093. In this class, students produce new fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, while reflecting on their lives, influences, and processes as artists and writers.

"Is it logical/rational that anyone would be afraid of the work that they were put here on earth to do?"

    — Elizabeth Gilbert

A beautifully polished, authentic, fragrant piece of redwood, suggestive of utter, aristocratic Art Deco’rum is where my prized possession, which I birthed, lay to rest: my debut memoir/novel. Not always living in full possession of my SELF, I fell prey to the attacks of one who took issue with my transparence, depictions of his character and ultimately, my audacity.

I was poised to receive more of the praise and encouragement that accounted for the majority of responses, when an individual—potentially the closest to me—delivered the harshest critique of a book I paid dearly for: I paid with the doldrums of solitude, sleepless nights, wrestling with my mind to distinguish thoughts to be penned from random “noise," the fear of alienation, and the intimidating publishing process. I had experienced a great deal of validation prior to his critique.  The individual, who I should not only feel safe with, but protected by, I had disappointed, embarrassed, offended and ultimately exposed/shamed. Certainly, curtly he relayed his truth despite my bleeding heart and needy, broken posture. My gifts, my passions, my truth…I bartered for his comfort and a pretentious sentiment of flawless rearing.

I paid dearly. What was a celebrated work of art, with the acclaimed potential, proven potential, to bless the lives of many was laid to rest like a dusty family photo album with faded, colorless pictures covered in desiccated, cracked plastic.

But for transformation, I remain…encouraged by the insolence of Alice Walker:

• “All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view."
• "I don't set out to upset people, but I've never been afraid to speak my truth," Alice explained.  "In my life and in my art, I've been loyal to myself. And that distresses folks. It's their task, not mine, to understand why. "

I Remain!

Exploring the Encounter between Buddhism and Western Psychotherapy at CIIS

By KAISA PUHAKKA, professor in the Clinical Psychology Department at CIIS

Recent decades have seen a fertile encounter between Buddhism and Western psychology. Unique among religious and spiritual traditions, Buddhism does not have a theology or beliefs of any kind as its foundation.  In its 2,500 year history it has taken root in many countries and possessed an amazing capacity to adapt to rather than oppose the cultural mores and beliefs of its host countries. But none of these mores or beliefs is essential to Buddhism. For example, many but not all Buddhists accept re-incarnation, karma, etc., which were prevalent beliefs in the early host countries. As much as we know of the historical Buddha, he counseled his disciples to not take any teachings on faith—not even his—but to verify their truth in direct personal experience and observation. It is this insistence on verification in direct observation, along with the concern with alleviation of suffering, that naturally aligns Buddhism with Western psychotherapy.  Cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy has indeed taken advantage of this alignment in widespread and successful adaptations of mindfulness meditation for managing stress, chronic pain, anxiety and depression.

But there is so much more to Buddhism than these simple adaptations. Buddhism has big ideas that reach through your innermost self all the way through the vast cosmos —like pratityasmutpada or the interdependence of all beings, or sunyata, the no-thingness or voidness of reality. And they are not just ideas but something to be realized in the immediacy of one's experience. I once asked a famous mathematician at a Zen monastery about the secret of his apparently inexhaustible creativity (he was 50 then). He said, “It's about being closest to my true self. You know, of course, my self is nothing at all,” he smiled and described how when sitting in the Zendo, mathematical forms spontaneously arise out of the void (sunyata). He had been sitting through sesshins for 24 years when I came to my first. Something coming from nothing—true creativity!

No Western psychology is big enough to fully contain these ideas, but we have bigger containers that could do more than symptom-focused cognitive-behavioral psychology—like psychodynamic psychotherapy, which considers the whole person and all of the psyche including the unconscious. It is indeed heartening to see the door being slowly cracked open in contemporary psychoanalytic circles not only for meditative techniques but for deeper inquiry into the self.  Like Buddhism, psychodynamic psychotherapy is concerned with alleviating suffering and also believes in disciplined self-inquiry and dispelling of illusions as key to liberation from suffering. In both, the inquiry is carried out in a formal relationship—between student and teacher in many forms of Buddhist practice and between patient and therapist in psychodynamic psychotherapy. There is enough common ground between the two traditions to meaningfully explore some of the vast differences that are there also. I believe it is in the dynamic tension of these differences that new discoveries and developments will take place, both for the grounding of Buddhist practice in Western cultural soil, and for awakening the spiritual soul of psychodynamic therapy.