On soul, therapy and transcontextuality

Reflections and queries

Transcontextual doodles, by the author

When things break down in our culture, individuals inevitably respond. With pathology. With violence. With conspiracy. With communication. With care and kindness. With empathy. With searches for sense and meaning. With pain. With ‘therapy’ and ‘healing’. Psychological therapies and other related therapeutic practices are supposed to help, but these are embedded in the very systems that create the pathologies. Might it be possible for some things to be salvaged that can help us in this complex, troubled life-ing we are all an integral part of?

Reflections

Human beings are just one manifestation of conscious and unconscious ‘life-ing’, in a symbiotic web or mesh of life and non-life. Yet we experience ourselves as ‘selves’ – singular psychological and spiritual entities – souls – connected to a greater or lesser degree to other entities. We are tempted to make sense or meaning of this personal existence - yet the challenge is just to follow the threads…

…Relational transcontextuality is like infinite overlays of life and experience - subtle, responsive and endlessly incremental.  Each change creates another change; each shift prompts another shift. The movement is constant. There is meaning too in the system, but it is not predictable, not here-to-there…

…Each pocket in this web is a piece of the soul. Each fragment of soul is dependent on all the others – the niche is not fixed or unchanging.  It doesn’t hold a permanent lifelong image, but a recognisable, ever-changing version of that image – always evolving, always unique, always in relationship…

…The image is the whole and part of the whole. The shape of the whole also holds a recognition of the image fragments of each living system in relation to all the other living systems. Emerging in every layer/overlay simultaneously are mutually influencing pieces of image, energy, memory, potential and learning…

…These ravel and unravel continuously. We might think of a ‘healthy system’ as one in which there is free flow – the psychological energies and entities always on the move: following the channels, whilst creating the channels which create the flows which create the channels…

…In and between layers of context these channels flow. Each time we (individual human learning systems) are touched/approached/affected by the flows, there is a moment of affect, a potential for learning and meaning…

…The experience of ‘me’ over time is a constellation, combination, accumulation of these moments creating an experience of ‘soul’ – of integrity – a moment in which the human self feels most freely embedded within the world, feels most authentically ‘shaped’ within its eco-niche (Plotkin); feels most clearly their species-being (Marx)…

…If the system is blocked or imbued with intention and limited dimensionality, or relies upon limited, siloed versions of truth, belief or assumption (the ‘cold’ data), patterns are created in which double binds, conflicts and misunderstandings inevitably emerge…

…These emerge ‘blindly’ – in that the causes of the effect are never fully seen – never can be – and are therefore impossible to understand completely. Only the recognition of the unseen layers of context can provide the potential for ‘mutual learning in relationship’ (or symmathesy)….

…The blocked or limited eco-system creates unseen consequences for the living systems within it. In human thought and behaviour, the consequences can be cultures ‘closed off’ from other cultures; systems (economic, political, social) with double-binds, self-fulfilling prophecies, limited potentials for description and conflicts and super-wicked problems baked in…

…The individual caught in a system that is blocked, distorted, limited, stalled or stuck feels as if they don’t ‘fit’.  The experience of ‘fit’ for an individual human can be at multiple levels. The cultural response is to experience this as a problem to solve, so the the dis-ease, discomfort or experience of no-fit will be at multiple levels too: physiological, psychological, behavioural, spiritual…

…The system, however,  ‘treats’ the problem at one or two levels of context only; for example, either within a medical paradigm or outside it – both polarities focussed on ‘fixing’, or ‘healing’, but neither embedded in or through the multiple layers of context and relationship…

…One way this may be experienced by the individual human is by their sense of shape or ‘fit’. This shape approximates to the emerging experience of image, self, soul, eco-niche, inheritance, blank slate, nurture, personality (depending on the metaphor being utilised). The shape emerges as an idea or image from some original self and then finds itself shape-shifting within and through the transcontextual layers of the systems we live within…

…From here the metaphor of shape or fit can emerge. This depends upon a fantasy of something/someone that we have become or are aiming to be – a state, condition or goal we work towards or try to reach.  Yet, the moment we fix an intention (or work with a limited metaphor) we lose the flow, are stuck in the layers, and our shape is not malleable enough to keep learning and responding in the channels, flows and places between and beneath…

…Fit is an internal individual experience – with emotional, cognitive, physiological and intuitive dimensions –that emerges from the expectations and assumptions of cultures and systems. Conversely, Shape is how we all are – and ideally we should all fit in the world. We don’t because acceptable diversity and difference is defined within sticky sick systems that have exploitation at their heart…

…Staying stuck can become a pathology, and the resulting sticky ‘disorder’ will reflect the place in the system where the individual or individuals have become enmeshed: in familial, social, political and economic traps and sticky parts of the web or mesh that control the ways relationships are organised and, more broadly and crucially, the ways humans are in relationship with ‘nature’…

…In this is an assumption that humans are or have been separated from something called ‘nature’. This assumption is reflected in the extractivist practices that emerged to build and consolidate historical and contemporary systems of capitalism. However it is also there in the counter-culture: in the so-called ‘alternative paradigm’ that says that we can live in harmony with something called ‘nature’ (by implication and ironically, still separate from humans) and eschew ‘unnatural’ materialism …

…Yet, nature is not an entity that humans have ruined, can live in harmony with or save – it is a reductionist concept that reflects assumptions of ‘balance’, ‘homeostasis’, ‘abundance’ – or some ‘golden-age’ of ‘interbeing’ that can be returned to, or evolved towards by communities of sovereign human selves and souls…

…That colonialist and eugenic assumptions are fundamentally baked into extractive capitalist systems is clear to many, but alternative paradigms also have these at their heart – with endless loops and spirals of double binds and contradictions. If I am a sovereign, awakened and highly developed person, then someone else is not…

…The naming of  ‘nature’ carries a cultural assumption of harmony – deified in an archetype of ‘Mother’ or ‘Gaia’. This might be more transcontextually transformed into multiply-described, embedded relationships between diverse living organisms, systems and places. Into this layered treatment, ‘labour’ can be reintroduced as a metaphor for the ways humans and non-humans act on and within the diverse natural and other-than-natural systems referred to as ‘nature’…

…This is still an ecological concern: ‘the ecology of the living world is full of mind’. If we are not embedded in a thing called ‘nature’, we (that is human and non-human persons-as-systems) are still collectively part of something – of everything, perhaps – and our interdependence has meaning, whether we seek it or not…

…Meanwhile, the surplus that our (human and other-than-human) labour creates can be exploited by stuck systems – as in capitalist economics – or could lead to the creative conditions for a transcontextual, collective something – experienced by the individual psyche as ‘soul-full’. Perhaps, then, ‘soul is in the surplus’…

…So, there is no place in this for the sovereign human or sovereign nation. The word implies a fantasy of control – of fixed inheritance, eugenics, anthropocentrism, hierarchy and conscious purpose. The idea and the practice inevitably gets ‘stuck’ in limited layers and contexts, creating its own particular double-bind. The ‘data’ is then attenuated and frozen – held in one or two layers; stuck in the oxbows and meanders of complex systems – becoming isolated and cut off from wider ecologies…

…Likewise, the fantasy of ‘homeostasis’ – ‘natural’ feedback loops – operates only in limited areas and within the parameters set within the wider system. The homeostatic fantasy imagines ‘nature’ as being self-sustaining in consciously predictable patterns; but operates only within limited and limiting frames – creating pathology for systems and individuals alike…

…If an individual is ‘successful’ at living within the frames of these limited pseudo-complexities, then this leads to madness of a kind that can only be recognised from ‘outside’ the cult, the company, the economic system, the nation, the family. From inside things seem ‘normal’. Conversely, if the individual does not ‘fit’, the system is experienced from inside as symptoms of individual pathology…

…Thus, the therapeutic process inevitably holds a contradiction. The person succeeding in a limiting isolating system, but behaving ‘madly’, will never seek ‘therapy’ (unless they leave or are removed from the system, and experience some kind of crisis that  can no longer be ignored)…

…To the outside, such a person may be regarded as ‘sociopathic’ or narcissistic’, but whilst inside, they experience their shape as ‘fitting’ and their psychological, relational needs as met.  This, however, is only true in the light of the limited ‘flow' and layering of the self-perpetuating stuckness of the community, system or society…

…However, those who go to therapy to heal symptoms emerging from the experience of living in limited, attenuated, stuck and double-binded systems (family, workplaces, societies, cultures, ecosystems) are likely to experience versions of the same assumptions, patterns and power dynamics…

…Therapists call a version of this transference, but this makes the assumption that the therapist is able to sit outside the damaging system (whether historical or in the here-and-now). Yet, relationships are real, not just echos of past attachments and traumas…

…Many of these limited frames and contexts are the characteristics of cultures – therapy culture is not removed from mainstream culture, it emerges and operates within in it. And they are insidious – un-noticed limiting processes that the therapist – even if very careful – will inevitably be part of in their life and work…

…Few therapists will refuse to try to help solve a problem that the client brings nor to work to heal a symptom or complaint. Trained and ‘registered’ psychological therapists all operate – to some extent – in a quasi-medical ‘clinical’ paradigm. Others work in ‘alternative’ paradigms in which psychological and physiological symptoms are regarded as spiritual pathologies (with spiritual ‘medicine’ or ‘natural cures’), or with theories in which the requirements of stages and developmental lines have been disrupted or not been fulfilled...

…In all these, the therapeutic intervention emerges from the same cultural systems that created the root of the pathology in the first place….

…The only way through this double-bind – and this is a tentative claim based on my personal experience as a therapist (and client) over the years, and so is necessarily subjective – might be to offer a relational space in which mutual transcontextual learning (symmathesy, as Nora Bateson has termed it) can occur, and in which the hidden images and potentials of self and soul in the free-flowing, multi-layered constellation of Nora Bateson’s Warm Data can emerge…

…By this transcontextual logic, therapy is not about trying to heal or focus on the individual with the ‘problem’. Perhaps the emphasis should be on simply offering the relational conditions for a messy conversation, as might sometimes occurs in family systems therapy, Open Dialogue or similar approaches. There then might emerge an inquiry into what the optimal conditions might be for further warm and messy conversations to take place (sometimes called the ‘working alliance’)…

…but how would we know, as every conversation is different and new, taking place, now, between between two (or more) unique and soulful living complex human systems in THIS myriad set of contexts? We might be able to  have a go at inquiring into the conditions for and validity of these peculiar conversations and see where it gets us…

Queries:

1. Can such conversations take place at all within an individual therapy paradigm in a society that is predicated on double binds and assumptions of atomisation and individual agency? If so, what would be the ‘requirements’ on the therapists, counsellors and coaches who might attempt this?

2. Is the family a ‘system’ in which both dysfunction and Warm Data can emerge and flow (and hence enabling symmathesy to occur)? How might this be supported by an intimate stranger (the therapist), or is this concept and practice a contradiction in terms? What might approaches like Open Dialogue teach us?

3. Can a community, a culture, an organisation or a discipline be a system in which both perceived ‘dysfunction’ and Warm Data can emerge and flow? How can conversations flow beyond the boundaries of these semi-closed and limiting systems or parts of systems in order to break through a stuck place or blockage?

4. How can an individual in systems, or part or fragment thereof, find their way through these systems without feeling the influences and hidden, insidious pathologies and unconsciously falling prey to the symptoms that lie within them? Is it inevitable that these pathologies emerge in this way? Are there other possibilities?

5. How can the ideas and practices of ‘ecology of mind’ be experienced, without resorting to reductionist concepts of ‘benevolent nature’? How can the edges of our ecological experience help us to learn and heal? How can human and other-than-human labour be recognised and integrated in a sense of ever-changing wholes that are parts of wholes?

6. What are the processes, ideas and conversations that might be ‘therapeutic’ – in the sense of being helpful in recontextualising lives, re-shaping or re-fitting individuals and reimagining systems?

7. Can these processes ever take place in the professional therapeutic space? Are these spaces and frames fit for purpose? Are they relevant and sufficient for the task in hand? What might need to be changed, shifted, opened, re-flowed? What might need to be simply noticed and worked with?

8. Are there other places and spaces in which this might be possible? People Need People and Warm Data Labs come to mind, but there are likely to be others – so where might we find them? And what might we build or adapt if they don’t currently exist?

Terms and sources

Transcontextuality: “Transcontextual interaction is the recognition that complex systems do not exist in single contexts, but rather are formed between multiple contexts that overlap in living communication and among living systems.” – https://batesoninstitute.org/warm-data-labs/ and also see Nora Bateson’s book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles: ‘Transcontextuality’, pp 79-81, Triarchy Press, 2016.

Double Bind: “The Double Bind Theory is a negative phenomenon that occurs in relationships when a significant person introduces a paradox that leaves us with no way out.” https://psychology-spot.com/double-bind-theory/. It was first outlined by Gregory Bateson and others in relation to the development of schizophrenia, but has since taken on wider context and meaning.

Warm Data: “Warm Data is information that is alive within the transcontextual relating of a living system.”: Nora Bateson, ‘New words to hold the invisible world of possibility: warm data, symmathesy and aphanipoiesis’, in Unpsychology 8: An Anthology of Warm Data, 2022: https://www.unpsychology.org or HERE.

Symmathesy: “Symmathesy (n) is an entity of transcontextual mutual learning.”: Nora Bateson, ‘New words to hold the invisible world of possibility: warm data, symmathesy and aphanipoiesis’, in Unpsychology 8: An Anthology of Warm Data, 2022: https://www.unpsychology.org or HERE. See also Small Arcs of Larger Circles: ‘Transcontextuality’, pp 168-193 & https://medium.com/@norabateson/symmathesy-709a39ccb5bc

Ecology of Mind: “For Bateson, the ecology of the living world is full of mind. They are minds that are constituted relationally, in networks, through their activity, their actual life-process. Bateson sees ecosystems as ecologies of mind. He also sees organisms as ecologies of mind.”: Jon Goodbun, ‘Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics - an addendum to Urban Political Ecology’ in www.field-journal.org vol.4 (1) - see also Gregory Bateson, Steps to an ecology of Mind. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3620295.html

The Mesh: “Notice how Darwin’s “entangled bank” suggests that we visualize inter- connected life-forms as a whole—and what is ecology if not the study of the fact of this interconnection? Yet what is this whole if not a flowing, shift- ing, entangled mess of ambiguous entities—entities that become even more ambiguous the closer we look? Or, as I shall be arguing here, the whole is a mesh, a very curious, radically open form without center or edge.” Timothy Morton, ‘The Mesh’ in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, Routledge, 2011 and at https://www.academia.edu/1046913/The_Mesh

Against Nature: Timothy Morton again: “One of the things that modern society has damaged has been thinking. Unfortunately, one of the damaged ideas is that of Nature itself. How do we transition from seeing what we call “Nature” as an object “over there”? And how do we avoid “new and improved” versions that end up doing much the same thing (embeddedness, flow and so on), just in a “cooler,” more sophisticated way? When you realize that everything is interconnected, you can't hold on to a concept of a single, solid, present-at-hand thing “over there” called Nature.” ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/p/about.html

Soul as Econiche: “A niche, in essence, consists of a thing’s unique set of relationships with every other thing in its ecosystem. A thing’s eco-niche — its Soul — is what makes it what it is on the deepest, widest, and most natural level of identity.” Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation, p15, New World Library, 2021.

Soul as acorn: “Scott London: In The Soul's Code, you talk about something called the "acorn theory." What is that? James Hillman: Well, it's more of a myth than a theory. It's Plato's myth that you come into the world with a destiny, although he uses the word paradigma, or paradigm, instead of destiny. The acorn theory says that there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.”: https://www.scott.london/interviews/hillman.html and also in The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Grand Central Publishing, 1997.

Soul is in the surplus: “That surplus that is soul can dream of a higher, universal idea, but those ideas are always singular and inflected by private desires. They can’t be generalized” (p106); “Surplus feeds the body which feeds the soul” (p134): McKenzie Walk, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, Verso Books, 2016.

Species being: “There is only one hope, and it is in eternal life, but this endless life has noting to do with spirit or even th idea. It isn’t universal. it only exists in the sensation of shared existence. living things are each other’s comrades, even in their struggles against each other. Our species being is lost from shared life when we make a festish of a particular idea, a particular love , or a particular labour…”: Mckenzie Wark, Molecular Red, Theory for other Anthropocene, Verso, 2016.

Transference: “is a phenomenon in which one seems to direct feelings or desires related to an important figure in one’s life—such as a parent—toward someone who is not that person. In the context of psychoanalysis and related forms of therapy, a patient is thought to demonstrate transference when expressing feelings toward the therapist that appear to be based on the patient’s past feelings about someone else.”: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/transference

Open Dialogue: “Working with families and social networks, as much as possible in their own homes, Open Dialogue teams help those involved in a crisis situation to be together and to engage in dialogue. It has been their experience that if the family/team can bear the extreme emotion in a crisis situation, and tolerate the uncertainty, in time shared meaning usually emerges and healing is possible.”: https://open-dialogue.net