Chapter 7
Vicissitudes of the dynamic psyche and their consequences for learning and creativity
In the early stages of transformative learning theory change was understood as an individual process of freeing the self from inhibiting psychic mechanisms resulting from upbringing or other negative effects of socialisation, similar to psychodynamic psychotherapies. Mezirow's ideas were strongly influenced by his relationship with psychoanalyst Roger Gould, who was applying a ‘popularised version of psychoanalytic theory to adult development’ (Finger and Asun, 2001: 55). This is visible in his descriptions of ‘perspective transformation’ as fraught with psychological difficulties, including ‘unresolved problems from childhood’ (Mezirow, 1981: 6, 9) or ‘rigid and highly defended thought patterns’ in some people (Mezirow, 1991: loc. 1771). Boyd, from his analytic psychological perspective, also saw transformation as liberation from ‘old patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting which previously prevented growth’ (Boyd and Myers, 1988: 279).
However, in Mezirow's subsequent work the depth psychological element has more or less disappeared, whilst the constructivist dimension of his thinking, influenced particularly by Kuhn's (1962) idea of ‘paradigm shift’, has become more dominant (Kitchenham, 2008: 113). This has shifted the focus from problematic psychic mechanisms afflicting some people to problematic socio-cultural discourses in the world (Mezirow, 2003: 58). Whilst the depth psychology strand originating from Boyd continues to focus on psychodynamic processes, there has also been a similar shift away from problems for some learners of ‘patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting’ that prevent growth to the universal process of individuation, or self-formation: ‘a process in which we gradually differentiate the self from the conditioning of early family and other external contexts, as well as from one's current environment’ (Dirkx, 2008: 73).
This shift away from problems with thinking and feeling that afflict some people avoids, of course, what is often seen as the tendency of depth psychological thinking to pathologise individuals by positing a healthy norm (e.g. Dirkx, 2006; Cranton, 2000). But I would suggest that it discourages research that attempts to distinguish between more or less workable psychic states in individual learners,1 which may account for the absence of work in the field on why some people are less open to transformative learning than others (Taylor, 2007: 187). This is a pity because, as Illeris says, ‘When it comes to non-learning, it is not about processes that are fulfilled but about processes that are blocked or derailed partially or totally’ (Illeris, 2004b: 86), and it is these processes at work in individuals that are my main concern. This is not to stigmatise or pathologise individual learners but to try to understand, and find ways to ameliorate, the effects of psychic mechanisms that interfere with thinking and creativity. Thus, in an attempt to understand better the process of individual change in transformative learning, I use psychodynamic theory to explore mechanisms underlying cognitive control and its origins.
Trauma and the closing down of the psyche
I have argued that reflexivity between the language-based autobiographical ‘I’ and the bodily core self is a key mechanism in the optimal functioning of the dynamic system of the psyche involving a process of neural differentiation and integration that results in psychic flexibility and stability. Yet it seems intrinsically difficult for the psyche to become and remain reflexive; even if we are fortunate enough to develop a sense of self-agency in childhood, the autobiographical ‘I’ can lose its flexibility at later stages of life, with adverse consequences for learning and creativity. One of the reasons for this may be that maintaining spontaneous contact with core consciousness is intrinsically difficult. I have already noted Damasio's view that our awareness of it gets easily obscured by the workings of consciousness extended by language, so that even under optimal conditions, we do not pay much attention to core consciousness unless we are specifically trying to articulate what our experience feels like. This echoes philosopher Eugene Gendlin's view that the ‘forms, concepts, definitions, categories, distinctions, rules’ that make up our everyday language are fixed patterns that obscure the ‘felt sense’ of our own meaning (Gendlin, 1991: 21). It is further supported by McGilchrist's view that the brain's hemispheres work by mutually inhibiting each other and that, whilst the right hemisphere has overall primacy, in the mutual inhibition stakes it is the left that has the advantage. This is because it is more conscious and self-aware than the right, the knowledge it provides is more linear and logical and therefore more readily graspable, and of course it has language at its disposal. Thus in a language-based culture left hemisphere knowledge easily takes priority over the more intuitive, complex knowledge of the right (McGilchrist, 2009: 227–9).2
There is also a logical reason why we might need to retreat from right hemisphere functioning and seek left hemisphere fixity in concepts, categories, rules, and distinctions. ‘The first-person body’, as Sheets-Johnstone calls the bodily core self, ‘is in and of the world, a felt lived world’; it is our primary point of sensory and emotional contact with inner and outer worlds. Optimally we can have more or less stimulation; we can open ourselves to engagement with others, or to learning or physical or artistic activities; or we can withdraw and reduce stimulation, create a balance. But when the felt lived world ‘becomes too much for us’ – when it causes us pain or makes us anxious – we have to defend ourselves against it (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 24). An effective way of doing this is to develop a relationship with the world that is more fixed and safer-seeming – more left hemisphere – rather than one that involves constant openness to change. This seems to be a common experience for many Group 2 students.
One of the main causes of the closing down of core consciousness is trauma. Emotional feelings that are too overwhelming or too painful have to be blocked off. When this happens, the left hemisphere, deprived of the holistic, largely unconscious meaning-making function of the right hemisphere, loses its grounding in everyday reality (Siegel, 1999: 35–6; Tershakovec, 2007: 56–63). Thus the trauma sufferer can lose the sense that time is moving between past, present, and future, and there is also a tendency for awareness to become split and the personality to become dissociated (Rothschild, 2000: 13). This can lead to mental chaos and confusion or to the freezing of the psyche (Siegel, 2003: 5). Susanna's experience of multiple losses combined with her illness diagnosis is an example of the freezing and splitting effects of trauma. She cannot confront the pain of her losses nor can she think about her future, rather she is fixated on her regrets about the past, so that time has ceased to flow. Her primary mental model of herself in the world is of a person with an illness and no future, which is partly a consequence of her feeling labelled by the medical system but, as I have suggested, might also be a necessary defence against psychic pain. Her illness identity, whilst challenging, provides a sense of wholeness and keeps the dissociated psyche under control, but the psychic freezing impairs her ability to function and for a while creativity is lost.
Ruth's defence against the unresolved trauma of unexpectedly losing her father when she is at university takes the form of an obsessive concern with protecting and containing her former boyfriend who suffers from alcoholism. This displacement of painful feelings onto another person distances her from experiencing them head-on. Her profession of actor also enables her to distance herself from her feelings: ‘I barely perform as myself’, she says. Both these devices provide a means of control, but the closing down of the psyche that results impairs her ability to think flexibly, whether in relationships or in her writing. She gets stuck in a rut and continues endlessly, ‘like a rat in a maze’, even though at some level she knows that another perspective is needed.
For Miranda the trauma of losing her mother to mental illness in childhood results in her existing for a long time in a ‘stunned fog’, a metaphor that aptly captures her freezing and withdrawal from the distress. This distancing from her feelings and the world provides a means of self-protection, but adversely affects her functioning. For example, it makes it difficult for her to have a sense of agency in relations with others, although she says this has improved somewhat in recent years:
when I said yes [to a friend's request to look after her cat for two weeks] I didn't qualify the yes. I didn't say oh but who's going to help me, or who's going to whatever. You say you can or you will do things that are just too much. And that which again goes back to family, it says yes I can be there at six and I will go to your house and I'll have another second dinner and oh until you're exhausted.
Not having spontaneous access to her feelings also makes it difficult to write her personal story: she has no sense of what is true for her (see Chapter 2). Both of these developments are intelligible in the context of trauma: when spontaneous access to core consciousness is lost, the ability to know intuitively what is right or wrong for oneself is impaired. As Siegel suggests: ‘One way of understanding unresolved trauma and unresolved grief is from the view of impairments to the process of neural integration’ (Siegel, 2003: 23, 31). Without the differentiating and integrating process of hemispheric reciprocity, different parts of the psyche become detached from each other and an ad hoc holistic structure has to be constructed and maintained by the left hemisphere.
The need to defend the psyche against anxiety
What we see happening in these three instances of trauma is a shift towards a defensive way of being that keeps painful feelings at bay but results in fragmentation of the psyche. A similar process can be observed in the need to defend against anxiety caused by on-going stress in childhood. For Claire and Jill there is a marked shift away from their spontaneous feelings in childhood because of having to deal with the long-term effects on the family of a difficult sibling. For both of them the shift is to compensate by being the good child. Being good means not being angry, so a way of relating to others without it has to be instituted. When Jill's anger against her father begins to emerge during the writing of her dissertation she notes that: ‘Up till now my self-narrative has been one of the “good child”, frightened of failing to live up to my father's expectations, wanting to gain his approval, not wanting to provoke his anger’, and this set the pattern for relationships with men throughout her life. But she remembers not being like that:
when I was young, I mean I suppose under ten, I used to think I could do anything, I mean really anything at all, anything I wanted to, it was all possible and I felt very sort of boy-girlish then, I didn't feel I had to please too many people and had an immense feeling of capacity, and I'm feeling some of that starting to come back ….
The mention of her child self as originally boy-girlish implies that for her being ‘good’ is a characteristic of being female and highlights the strong presence of a cultural self-concept in her shift (Symonds, 1978: 195). That this shift to compliance then becomes a standard feature of her mature psyche indicates the power of this cultural self-concept to provide an acceptable mental model for women coming to maturity in the 60s and 70s, but the shutting off of anger impairs her sense of agency in close relations and makes creative self-expression difficult. This is also the case for Claire.
For a significant number of Group 2 students the closing down of the psyche is a reaction to carers' inability to recognise and nurture their spontaneous temperament. Temperament is generally regarded as innate and can be thought of as ‘dispositions to react in certain ways to a variety of situations’, with the different ways infants express and regulate the emotions being a central feature (Fox, 2008: 53–5). The emotions will of course be modulated by life experience, particularly by upbringing (ibid.: 61), and sometimes the family environment forces children to repress aspects of their spontaneous temperament. We have seen this at work most painfully in the case of Maria, where a combination of the oppressive Catholic environment of her upbringing and her mother's inability to help her manage her emotions undermines her confidence to express herself and impairs her ability to learn. Her comment that she cannot ‘contain’ her learning echoes the view that learning necessarily involves opening ourselves to change (Rogers, 1951); thus if we cannot be psychically open because we cannot manage our emotions, we will have difficulties with learning.
There are other instances where spontaneous moves to self-expression are discouraged by carers, with adverse consequences for development. Rhiannon's mother's intrusiveness by reading her daughter's diary where she records her early attempts at poetry brings this ‘first love’ to a premature end, blocking her creativity for many years. Like Jill and Claire, rather than pursuing her spontaneous desires she becomes adept at fitting in with what others want her to be: ‘I had become very adept at not being me, being the person that I thought I wanted to be, or that other people wanted me to be and I was quite good at that’. Repressing her spontaneous temperament results in the closing down of inner space for learning and creativity, which may account for the difficulties she experiences as an adult when trying to structure her burgeoning ideas into a coherent whole, particularly in her academic writing: the intuitive ‘felt sense’ (Gendlin, 1991) for what makes a rounded piece of writing is absent. Harriet's retreat into compliance under the impact of her mother's oppressive rules and negativity towards her spontaneous desire to write creatively provides another example.
That schooling sometimes has a similar detrimental effect on spontaneous manifestations of temperament is visible in the experience of several students. As we have seen, Claudia remembers having idiosyncratic ways of thinking as a child, making unusual connections between things and endlessly weaving stories, which were disapproved of by the nuns at school and came to be labelled as bad. Stacey also remembers having her own particular ways of learning – needing to do things in her own time and on her own – that were not validated by teachers, and Tess is oppressed by teachers at her boarding school for not conforming to the tidy, organised child they expected her to be. Seeing that temperament includes the amount of energy children bring to an activity, their reactions to unfamiliarity, responsiveness to stimulation, distractibility, and attention span (Thomas and Chess, 1977, quoted in Fox, 2008: 55), it seems perfectly possible that they will develop idiosyncratic ways of learning early on that may feel organic to them but may not be understood by teachers or parents, or may be at odds with standard teaching methods. As we have seen, Simon retreats from his school's ‘cramming’ approach into playing with painting, with the result that his playful, creative side does not integrate and subsequently gets overlaid by the demands of the army, career, and family. Stella does not have time to find out what she is naturally good at, because of her mother's mantra that she is generally not good enough by comparison with her older sister, ‘the academic one’. The anger associated with these oppressive childhood environments would in all likelihood have had to be repressed or defended against, leading to anxiety and impairing the development of confidence in actual talents and abilities (Horney, 1937).
Compliance as a ‘solution’ to fear and anxiety
It is striking that for a good proportion of the female students in Group 2, the default mode in response to anxiety in childhood is to become compliant to other people's wishes and expectations. This is not surprising in view of children's primary need for safety, which means retaining their parents' love and approval. Apart from those students already mentioned, a tendency towards compliance is visible in Harriet's, Stella's, and Stacey's struggles to legitimise their strong desire to develop their creativity in the face of their dominant self-concepts as carers, where others' creativity or welfare are seen as more important. Compliance as a dominant strategy is also visible in Lucy's tendency to lose her identity in close relationships:
something I've always struggled with is, particularly in partnerships and in friendships, is losing bits of myself to the other person and becoming drawn in by what they would like me to be as opposed to what I am, which given that I am quite kind of opinionated always seems quite surprising to other people, but I think women sometimes do have other female friends who seem to do it, but I'm terrible at it, so I'll just lose who I am bit by bit by bit ….
Again, the mention that this tendency is prevalent amongst women implies that it is usual for them to become compliant in close relationships. As I said in con-nection with Jill, there is clearly a cultural element here, but whilst compliance is fully intelligible in the generation born in the 1940s and 1950s where it was the dominant model for women, it is not so intelligible in the younger generation for whom there is a wider range of models. This may indicate that compliance is a safer and more powerful option than other cultural models available to women when the primary need is to defend against anxiety.
The presence of a dominant self-concept such as compliance with its demands that we fit in with or prioritise others' needs and desires rather than our own can be understood in the context of Karen Horney's concept of ‘life solutions’, which she sees as a long-term response to anxiety in childhood (Horney, 1951). The child's short-term response is to defend itself by moving against people and becoming aggressive, or away from people and becoming withdrawn, or towards people and becoming compliant (Horney, 1946), moves that mirror the emergency reactions of fight, flight, and submission observed in nature (Paris, 1994).3 Horney suggests that under optimal conditions we can move back and forth between our need for self-assertion, distance, and closeness in our relations with others, but where anxiety has to be defended against, these ways of relating lose their flexibility. Unless ameliorating circumstances intervene, these initial moves develop, in adolescence and adulthood, into ‘life solutions’: moving against people becomes expansiveness (or ‘the appeal of mastery’), moving away from people becomes detachment (or ‘the appeal of freedom’), and moving towards people becomes compliance (or ‘the appeal of love’) (Horney, 1951). For Horney the usual pattern is for one of the three ‘solutions’ to become dominant, whilst the other two are repressed but continue to operate under the surface, giving rise to inner conflicts. However, from my own experience and that of my students the pattern seems to be that one solution becomes dominant and the emotions and parts of the personality that do not fit get split off and operate as ‘sub-personalities’ (Rowan, 1990).4 Those that do not conflict unduly with the main solution will operate in tandem with it, whilst those that do conflict will be repressed, although, in line with Horney's view, they will continue operating in the background, causing inner conflicts.5
Horney suggested that life solutions are best understood as ‘directions of development’ rather than as personality types (Horney, 1951: 191). It seems likely that the solutions people adopt and the way they combine them depends not only on individual temperament, but also on existing models in their childhood environment, particularly those of parents, and in the culture at large. Thus compliance finds fertile ground in the traditional cultural stereotype that a woman's role is to be a carer or facilitator of others, and institutionalises it as a self-concept that can provide a sense of unity and wholeness. This is not to suggest that compliance cannot be adopted as a strategy by men; indeed Simon says more than once that his main strategy is to be nice to people when underneath he's really a grumpy old man, and it is perhaps significant that one of the two characters he creates in the ‘Self as Source’ exercise has ‘a deep need to be liked’. Nevertheless compliance does seem to be more prevalent amongst women.
The splitting-off of expansiveness and the need for control
Becoming compliant is a logical strategy where anger cannot be expressed for fear of losing the love or approval of powerful adults. Adapting our behaviour and wishes to fit in with what we imagine others expect or need means that anger automatically gets repressed because it is expansive and therefore inappropriate. This, however, compromises our ability legitimately to assert ourselves against others, and there will also be a taboo on personal ambition and competing with others (Horney, 1951: 318–20). This means that important aspects of spontaneous temperament, particularly the natural vitality or playfulness required for developing creativity, are likely to be repressed too or at least split off into an expansive sub-personality. The result is a general weakening of the psyche, so that it becomes more difficult to develop confidence and a sense of agency.
I derive this picture from a dialogue between Horney's theory and what I see happening in students' experience. For example, it is striking how many Group 2 students unearth both anger and a part of themselves that feels authentic and creative. It is as if the repression of anger entails the repression of a whole dimension of spontaneous temperament, rather than just the emotion itself. This may be because emotions and the way they are regulated are an integral part of temperament, as I said above. Needless to say, this powerful composite of emotion and temperament, repressed beneath a compliant life solution, does not cease to operate; rather, without opportunities for expression, it grows larger and potentially more disruptive. It also fails to mature along with the rest of the personality. Thus it becomes a dangerous expansive presence in the psyche, which then requires additional means of control.
Some of the students unearth not just a tendency towards compliance in relations with others and an unruly, expansive part of the personality, but a rule-bound, perfectionistic sub-personality whose role is to keep the expansive part under control. This is particularly visible for Claire, who associates her rule-bound tendency with the ‘strict parent’ part of herself that needs to get everything right. Both Megan and Tess become similarly aware of a conflict between a rule-bound part of the psyche and a rule-flouting part. Tess thinks that she opts for the rule-bound part in order to escape from the rule-flouting part that is too difficult for her to manage. This is a legitimate response in view of how the unruly or childish parts of the personality manifest themselves when they are liberated. As we have seen, when Simon's writer-self is given its freedom to create characters, it turns to rape and murder, which Simon finds shocking. Claudia's creative side emerges manically, leading her to feel that she can achieve anything regardless of the circumstances, but is quickly followed by a plunge into depression and self-torment when it is clear that she cannot. Maria's sensuous gypsy side also leads her into dangerous personal territory at one point.
The emergence in the psyche of a rule-bound sub-personality is a defensive top-down way of keeping the unruly side under control.6 It may be an internalisation of a parent figure whose voice was dominant in childhood (Lewis, 2002), which certainly seems to be the case for Harriet, who associates her tendency to repress her spontaneous desire for self-expression with her mother's mantra that men are the creative ones. The controlling sub-personality can be effective, allowing everyday life to proceed reasonably well as long as the unruly sub-personality is kept out of sight. But if the desire to be creative remains strong, as it clearly does for many of the students, who have specifically come to the MA to learn how to free up their creativity, the resulting tug of war between the controller and the controlled can seriously interfere with the creative process.
As I have argued elsewhere (Hunt and Sampson, 2006: 65), creativity is an essentially reflexive activity that involves spontaneous psychic movement back and forth between bodily-felt immersion in our material and distancing ourselves from it sufficiently to craft it into shape. I call this accessing and objectifying the material (Hunt, 2001). Where the rule-bound part of the psyche has to keep the unruly creative part under control, there are likely to be problems with both of these cognitive tasks, as there will be insufficient psychic space and movement. For example, Megan says that her creative side is too risky and unconventional, and she fears giving it its freedom in case it exposes things about her that she does not want others to see. So she sticks with the safer, more conventional side of herself, which is why she gets bored with her writing and does not persist. The problem here is connecting sufficiently with bodily-felt material for writing that will be more personally meaningful and prevent her becoming bored. A similar problem afflicts Simon's creative writing.7 Lucy indicates that both accessing and objectifying her material is a problem in her academic writing: ‘I can lack attention to detail and the ability to step back and see the wood for the trees’. Like Simon and Megan, she skids along the surface ‘making do the whole time’, although she is aware that she needs to delve more deeply. She can neither get sufficiently in touch with her material nor distance herself sufficiently from it, to develop what, she feels, would make a good essay. She ascribes this difficulty to a lack of confidence.
The consequences for agency of the shift away from the core self
Lucy's mention of a lack of self-confidence is echoed by many of the other students, whether in connection with their creative or academic writing, or generally. As I have shown in Chapter 2, this is often accompanied by very high expectations of what they believe they ‘should’ be able to achieve. This is likely to be in part the consequence of unhelpful schooling methods or parental attitudes, with deeper intrapsychic mechanisms at work associated with the shift away from spontaneous connection with the bodily core self and the conflict between different parts of the personality where this has developed.
For Horney the loss of spontaneous contact with the core self and the formation of a ‘life solution’, which she refers to as ‘alienation from the real self’ (Horney, 1951: 157), is a move away ‘from [one's] own feelings, wishes, beliefs and energies. It is the loss of the feeling of being an active determining force in [one's] own life. It is the loss of feeling [oneself] as an organic whole’. This last sentence is particularly relevant in a dynamic systems' context: we are no longer in touch with the bodily-felt sense of wholeness originating in the right hemisphere core self. This means that the psyche lacks an adequate centre for the development of a realistic mental model of the self-in-the-world, with genuine self-worth and robust self-agency; the naturally occurring ‘leading edge’ of the psyche is lost.8 To compensate, an ‘idealised image’ (Horney, 1951) emerges as the leading edge (Tershakovec, 2007: 178–9). In compliance, for example, being good or nice in the eyes of others becomes idealised; in perfectionism what is idealised is being right; in expansiveness it is triumphing over others. These idealised characteristics will be underpinned by a set of rules for behaviour, which Horney calls ‘shoulds’, and these must be adhered to rigidly in order for any sense of self-worth to be generated (Horney, 1951). However, this is not grounded self-worth, as it is rooted in the extent to which we can fulfil the rules rather than in realistic self-evaluations. It is also short-lived, so that it must be continuously generated. This sets up a vicious circle (positive feedback)9 of seeking short-term ‘highs’ or validation from others and means that the activities from which we derive these take priority. If this is pleasing others, then we will find endless ways and opportunities for doing this at the expense of our real needs. This might account, for example, for the struggles that some of the students experience in making legitimate space for their own creativity within their dominant caring roles.
Once the system of idealisation has been set in motion it becomes very difficult to relinquish, because what we actually are – our ‘actual self’ in Horney's terms – falls far short of what we have now come to expect of ourselves. It becomes the ‘despised image’, constantly subject to inner attack (Horney, 1946: 112). The whole complex of idealised and despised images, and the mechanisms that come into play to support the demands of the idealised image, Horney calls the ‘pride system’ (Horney, 1951: 111). I understand this as a complex of cognitive mechanisms, particularly vicious circles, that strategically employ emotions such as fear or anxiety to alert the system to infringements of the ‘shoulds’ so that defensive action can be taken. This is a form of top-down self-regulation.
To put this in the context of my previous discussions, when the psyche moves away from, or fails to develop, its grounding in the right hemisphere core self, it loses the spontaneous emotional feedback system that enables us to evaluate realistically our relations with the world or our own abilities and level of develop-ment. This may account for why so many of the students have unrealistically high expectations for what they ‘should’ be able to achieve in their creative or academic writing, and why they easily become depressed or tormented when brilliance or excellence is not instantly forthcoming, even when they are in fact doing rather well. Recall Lucy's comment that: ‘even if I'd got 100% on each essay [I] would not be satisfied’, which indicates idealised expectations that can never be fulfilled. This inability to gauge our actual level of development is perhaps not surprising if the psyche is dominated by idealisation backed up by self-punishment. No doubt for some people the urgent need to excel is understandable against the background of over-critical parents or punitive schooling methods, but there is, for some at least, a marked lack of realism in what can be achieved in a short space of time. The urgency to excel, which is an expansive drive, also makes sense in the context of a conflict between compliance and expansiveness, which Horney sees as a major inner conflict (Horney, 1951: 112).10 Neither side of this divide allows space for the gradual development of actual talents; rather what is important is the short-term high of being the best, whether in goodness or brilliance.
The fear of self-exposure through creative writing, another dominant theme I highlighted in Chapter 3, is also partly intelligible in this context: doing the writ-ing and sharing it with others threatens to reveal our actual level of development as an academic or creative writer and therefore risks exposing us to inner attack when this fails to live up to our idealised expectations. In the light of the above it is clear that making space for developing our actual talents and abilities, as much as we might want to do this, presents formidable difficulties. Surprisingly, it is possible for many of us to function reasonably well under these conditions as long as we limit our lives to what is possible given the restrictions. However, the pushes and pulls of the pride system are likely to be exhausting, and there will be a sense of frustration. Sometimes there will be a pervasive feeling of inauthenticity, as indicated by some students' feeling of ‘being an imposter’ or ‘a big sham’ in relation to their writing or learning. The other dimension of the fear of exposure through creative writing, which I highlighted in Chapter 2 – the fear of disrupting the existing configuration of the psyche – also makes sense in this context. Whilst the psychic status quo might be confining and frustrating, it is at least familiar and provides a degree of safety. Opening ourselves up to the chaos of creativity and learning can be terrifying if there is a potentially dangerous and disruptive presence in the psyche that we have not learned to manage effectively. Thus control is essential.
Fragmentation versus multiplicity of the psyche
It has been suggested that it is a standard development to have different selves with different voices in the psyche (Hermans, 2002), and it seems likely that different dimensions of our personality might well manifest themselves as different ‘characters’,11 especially if they are associated with different roles we play in life. Where the psyche is dynamic and open, it may be possible to move between them as occasion demands or allows. But the sub-personalities that manifest in students' experience are often at odds with each other, inhibiting creativity. Damasio's view is that whilst it is likely that there can be only one core self, it is possible for there to be more than one at the level of the autobiographical self, but he links this with multiple personality disorder (MPD) rather than optimal development (Damasio, 2000: 142–3). Indeed the painful reality of being truly fragmented is evident in the distress experienced by people suffering from such disorders.12
Clearly, the sort of fragmentation visible amongst the students does not constitute MPD, since all of them are functioning reasonably well, albeit with a degree of struggle and distress in some instances. Rowan, building on Beahrs (1982), suggests that dissociation or splitting of the psyche exists along a continuum with dream and drug-induced states of boundary-loss at one end and the extreme fragmentation of MPD at the other, and in between a range of everyday psychic multiplicity from fluctuations in mood to sub-personalities to ‘possession’ (Rowan, 1999: 11). Ross argues against the idea of a continuum because MPD, or dissociative identity disorder (DID), as it is now called, has discrete characteristics not present in what he refers to as ‘normal polypsychism’, the normal multiplicity of the human mind. The difference between DID and normal psychic multiplicity ‘is in the degree of personification of the ego states, the delusion of literal separateness of the personality states, the conflict, and the degree of information blockage in the system’ (Ross, 1999: 193). Whether or not there is a continuum, it would not be surprising – in view of the complexities for human beings of having large and powerful brains with different levels of self and consciousness, and the two hemispheres of the brain providing very different views of the world, not to speak of the vicissitudes of upbringing and of living in complex societies – if psychic multiplicity was the norm, with different degrees of fragmentation representing less workable configurations. Thus, when the psyche is grounded in the body, we can be fluidly multiple, using the different dimensions reflexively in our engagement with the world and the development of our talents and abilities without being overly aware of them as separate. When the psyche is not so grounded, these dimensions become fragmented and potentially in conflict. Only in extreme circumstances might this give rise to what we designate as multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder.
McGilchrist refers to empirical evidence indicating that dissociation involves ‘a disconnection from the right hemisphere and an interhemispheric imbalance in favour of the left’ (McGilchrist, 2009: 236). Seeing that one of the features of the narrow attention of the left hemisphere is that it isolates and fixes phenomena – reifies them as objects, one might say – (ibid.: 3), the mental model of the self-in-the-world resulting from left hemisphere dominance might well be a whole consisting of separate, unintegrated parts, rather than the bodily based sense of wholeness generated by the right hemisphere. However, Platt argues that it is not the fragmenting attention of the left hemisphere that leads to dissociation, rather the left hemisphere, deprived of the reality-evaluating input of the right hemisphere, ‘confabulates the dissociative story’ (Platt, 2010: 11–12). This makes sense when applied to Horneyan life solutions, in which the imagination is placed in the service of idealisation, where it creates impossibly glorious images of what we ‘should’ be in the world and punishes us when we fail to achieve them (Horney, 1951: 31–9). However, I would not rule out McGilchrist's view; the confabulating story may well be the left hemisphere's attempt to create a sense of wholeness out of the fragmentation.
Dominant self-concepts as a quest for wholeness
The picture that emerges from the experience of many of the students, then, is of insufficient grounding in, or disconnection from, felt bodily agency, which has resulted in a number of different parts of the personality pulling in different directions, making creativity or learning difficult. It is not surprising that many of us so afflicted, whether in response to short-term trauma or long-term anxiety, restrict ourselves to what is possible within the constraints of, say, one particular dimension of the split, or find some other overarching means of keeping the psyche under control and feeling whole. When I look at the ways students do this, I can see that there is a strong conscious tendency to identify with social self-concepts that are rooted in their actual lives, such as professional or formal identities. This is certainly the case for Claire, Rhiannon, and Lucy, who are all strongly defined by their professional roles, which make it possible to function well in those areas of life, although creativity is compromised. This is also the case for Jill before the MA, as she only discovers her problems with creativity once she retires. Harriet is strongly defined by her academic identity and has accumulated an impressive array of qualifications, but again at the expense of space for her creativity. It may be that academic study and writing have been possible for her because they do not involve deep engagement with self and emotions, in a similar way to Ruth's acting. Harriet also has a strong identity as a carer of others, as do Stacey and Stella, whether professionally or as mothers. Whilst Maria does not talk much about what contained her sense of being split before she began the MA, there is an indication that it was her strong identity as a healthcare professional, as she says at one point that this has been badly disrupted by the MA and has had to be re-made. For Simon it is his roles as husband, father, and grandfather that hold his fragmented psyche together, although he has constantly to adjust himself to fit them. For Susanna it is, I have suggested, her illness identity that enables her to keep control over her painful feelings and to derive a sense of wholeness.
Social self-concepts are, of course, an inevitable and necessary part of our immersion in everyday life (Neisser, 1988). But I would suggest that when the psyche is integrated and agentic as a result of being grounded in the body there can be movement between self-concepts: we can find satisfaction in being a teacher or a mother, whilst simultaneously feeling justified in allowing space for our creativity when time allows. When integration is impaired, however, and spontaneous contact with the bodily core self is lost, self-concepts have to provide us with a way of keeping under control the unintegrated parts of the psyche. They act as an effective capstone on the split psyche, providing a measure of safety and containment, but they limit the amount of the psyche available to us.
Defending the split psyche is also a very time and energy consuming task. By contrast with bodily-based reflexivity, which is both grounded and flexible, the psyche has to be constantly monitored, a form of psychic control that, drawing on Sass (1992), I will call ‘hyperreflexivity’.13 Applied to defensive self-concepts, hyperreflexivity works to maintain tacit awareness of the dominant self-concept so that its rules are always available as a means of shoring up the fragmented psyche. It is a form of self-objectification in the service of an unrelenting top-down self-regulation. This move away from bottom-up bodily-based wholeness towards a top-down ad hoc unity can provide a degree of stability and identity, but it is stability at the expense of growth. For when our cognitive and emotional resources are employed to provide a sense of unity for the split psyche, the possibilities for inner space and psychic movement decrease, so that the cognitive flexibility necessary for learning and creative work is impaired. Control of the fragmented psyche can be seen as a means of halting the reflexivity and change that is intrinsic to a dynamic system; in other words it is a strategy for stopping the flow of time (Siegel, 2003). This is most visible in Susanna's case where her sense of temporal ongoingness has been severely affected, but it is also there implicitly in the blocking or separating off of the creative temperamental part of the personality that afflicts many of the students.
Loosening psychic control and expanding the psyche
The loosening of psychic control and the opening-up of the psyche to inner space and movement, which happens for all the Group 2 students to varying degrees, is quite challenging, as I have shown, with repressed emotions and unintegrated parts of the personality becoming freed up and differentiated. Whilst, as I said in Chapter 6, small changes in the leading edge of the psyche can lead to quick and significant changes across the whole dynamic system, it takes time for the different parts of the personality to move towards integration and for bodily-based regulation of the whole dynamic system to develop. Recall that the other side of openness and stability is (relative) chaos (Siegel, 1999), and not a few students report being significantly at sea at the end of their first year of study (see Chapter 11). The tendency might simply be to close down again, which was certainly the case for Claudia during the latter part of the MA.
In some instances new, holistic mental models can be seen to emerge spontaneously, often at the implicit rather than the explicit level, which indicates a move towards better regulation of the psyche. Simon's metaphor for his sense of self as author – the rancher comfortably surveying the unruly prairie of the imagination – is an example of this, as is Maria's storyteller-self who contains the space of storytelling for her family's history. In both these instances there is also evidence of dialogue rather than conflict between the expansive side of the personality and the managing side. Simon's distinction between his expansive ‘writer’ self and his managing ‘author’ self is an apt conceptualisation of the different parts of the psyche involved in writing: ‘author’ is a social self-concept associated with having produced a piece of writing for an audience, whilst ‘writer’ implies the embodied process of writing. For other students a more benevolent parental part of the psyche emerges whose role it is to manage the unruly childish part rather than control it. Susanna's experience demonstrates this, as does Claire's, Ruth's, and Harriet's. Lucy is keen to find a self-concept that feels more fitting for her as a single childless woman in her 40s. This is not just a quest for another defence, rather, as she is ‘happier to embrace contradictions as to who I am’, it is a desire to find an identity in the world that resonates with an important dimension of herself.
Tershakovec suggests that ‘mental models only make a good way of thinking if we already have, and can consciously revise, a sound master model of the self and of the world, a model of the self-in-the-world’ (2007: 123). That students are beginning to develop new and more flexible mental models of the self-in-the-world, as illustrated above, provides strong evidence that there has been a shift away from the less flexible mental models with which they began their studies and the beginnings of the development of, or a return to, a ‘sound master model’ informed by the reality-evaluating core self. I say ‘return to’, because some of the students characterise their experience of change as a sense of re-finding themselves. I'm thinking of Susanna's ‘I'm easing back into myself’, but there is also Maria's ‘I am finding my way back to myself’, Claudia's ‘I feel very much a sense of the true me’, and Rhiannon's ‘It's … a re-awakening of who I am’. These comments indicate that for some people change is a reconnection with a previously known state. This supports Siegel's (1999) suggestion that traumatic or anxiety-rovoking events at any time across the lifespan can disrupt hemispheric integration.14
Having increased access to the bodily core self and to the whole range of the emotions means that there is a bodily basis for agency on which a grounded sense of self-worth can develop. Clearly this is centrally important in being better able to manage relations with others, as some of the students have found. It is also centrally important in a learning context, where it allows actual talents and abilities to be valued and therefore developed progressively over time rather than, in instances where idealisation has come to form the leading edge of the psyche, lost sight of in the pursuit of short-term highs. Indeed, one of the most striking developments amongst Group 2 students is how many of them begin to be able to evaluate their creative and academic writing more realistically and to trust their own judgement. This is particularly visible in Susanna's experience, but it is also there in Simon's and Maria's and in that of many of the others. Whilst this is in part the result of sharing their work in small groups and getting feedback from tutors (see Chapter 9), engaging more readily with the felt body for learning and writing is, I suggest, an important factor here.
As I said in the Introduction, the relationship between structure and agency is a key ontological theme in the findings of this research at a number of different levels. What the foregoing discussion leads me to conclude is that genuine self-agency and self-worth can develop only if the psyche has a flexible leading edge, that is, the autobiographical ‘I’ in spontaneous and reflexive contact with the bodily core self. In other words, a bottom-up or bodily-based reflexive self-structure giving rise to a stable but flexible core state (Fosha, 2005) is the key to the psyche's ability to differentiate and integrate itself in its innate drive towards maximum complexity and agency (Siegel, 2003). How the different elements of the CWPD programme work together to open-up the psyche and generate reflexivity is the subject of Part III.
Notes
1 Kegan's constructive-developmental approach (2000) does distinguish between more or less workable psychic states, but he uses fictional examples only and does not explore the question of why some people do not make the shift from what he calls the ‘socialized mind’ to the ‘self-authoring’ or ‘self-transforming’ mind. Cranton (2000) distinguishes between different learning styles rather than more or less workable psychic states.
2 McGilchrist argues that the tendency towards left hemisphere dominance in Western culture is a consequence of post-Enlightenment thinking with its privileging of reason at the expense of feeling, as well as the progressive atomisation of life since the industrial revolution, as reflected in our art as much as in our scientific and bureaucratic culture. This is not to deride reason, but to highlight the imbalance that has developed between the different views of the world provided by the brain's hemispheres (McGilchrist, 2009: 389–427).
3 Attachment theorist Allan Schore also sees the early response to anxiety in the emergency reactions of fight and flight (Schore, 1994). The biological basis of these moves may account for their tenacity, as we have seen in the case of compliance.
4 For Rowan a sub-personality is ‘a semi-permanent and semi-autonomous region of the personality capable of acting as a person’ (Rowan, 1990: 8). I see it as a complex of emotions and character traits that can dominate the psyche temporarily or permanently but is not a complete person.
5 Horney identifies different manifestations of the three main solutions, such as perfec-tionistic, narcissistic, or arrogant-vindictive behaviour in the case of expansiveness (Horney, 1951: 193). However, it has been suggested that some of these tendencies can become combined with any of the three main solutions, so that, for example, perfectionism could just as easily be a feature of compliance or detachment (Riso and Hudson, 1996: 323). In fact Horney implies that perfectionism is a general feature of idealisation (Horney, 1951: 24–5).
6 This is an example of collaboration between perfectionism and compliance rather than conflict between them (see previous note).
7 For McGilchrist boredom results from the dominance of the left hemisphere, which represents experience rather than capturing its felt presence as the right hemisphere does (McGilchrist, 2009: 191–2).
8 The idea of ‘decentering’ the self (Derrida, 1978) as the deconstruction of a singular sense of self can be usefully understood not as a liberation from the self but from a controlling autobiographical ‘I’, which facilitates a more fluid, bodily-based sense of self. Logically this should be called a ‘recentering’ rather than a ‘decentering’, as it involves finding a bodily grounding that allows movement and flexibility of the psyche.
9 Horney's notion of the psychic vicious circle (or positive feedback) is consonant with the notion of ‘recursive causality’ (Lewis, 2005) in dynamic systems theory.
10 Horney reserves the term ‘central inner conflict’ for the deeper conflict that occurs later in therapeutic work between the entire pride system and the real self.
11 I am reluctant to call them ‘selves’, as this makes them too separate and autonomous.
12 It has become fashionable to celebrate the fragmentation of the psyche because it allows us to change our identity at will (e.g. Gergen, 1991), but it seems unlikely that we could function coherently if our personality was intrinsically fragmented, without a sense of wholeness. Indeed, the drive to wholeness, whether this is the intrinsic biological drive that motivates the psyche as a dynamic system, or the drive to construct an alternative holistic self-structure based on idealised images or dominant self-concepts in instances where basic anxiety or trauma initiates a shift away from the bodily core self, indicates that a sense of psychic wholeness is essential for human functioning.
13 Sass uses this term to describe the extreme objectifying of the self-concept in schizophrenia, but he also suggests that there are likely to be less extreme forms of self-objectification. I would suggest that Horneyan life solutions, or self-concepts containing a narrative of ‘shoulds’ (Hunt, 2000), can be understood as an everyday form of hyperreflexive self-objectification.
14 For Schore (1994), by comparison, lack of hemispheric integration results from inadequate parenting in infancy.