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If you were to bust into a psychiatric conference, attract everyone\u2019s attention by some means, and then object loudly that both psychiatry (and medicine in general) are deeply flawed because they treat people as if they were physical or material entities when they’re not, you would undoubtedly provoke a fair amount of laughter before you were escorted unceremoniously to the door.\u00a0 The response of most of us to such an objection would be incredulity: \u201cWhat else would we be?\u00a0 We aren\u2019t ghosts, we are solid physical beings\u201d.\u00a0 This answer is so manifestly true that it is hard to stand up to it.\u00a0 It is like the philosopher who came to the conclusion that nothing exists really, only to painfully stub his toe on the way out of the door.\u00a0 If the body isn\u2019t real, then how come it hurts so much when I sit on a thumbtack?<\/p>\n
It is manifestly true that we are<\/em><\/strong> physical entities, but that is only part of it!\u00a0 That’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. If we get hung up on the obvious then we miss an awful lot which is not obvious, but which is no less real for not being obvious.\u00a0 This, put in rather more technical language, is the message of the Belgian Chemist Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on self-organising systems.\u00a0 Prigogine found as the result of his investigations that it is impossible to derive a fundamental level of description from which to explain the behaviour of self-organising systems<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/em> This means that what we are able to predict about the system on the basis of our models is always subject to radical revision because there are always levels of organisation that we don\u2019t know about but which are, potentially, just as important to the functioning of the system as the level that we do<\/em> know about.\u00a0 Prigogine and others such as Erich Jantsch have been quick to point out that people are self-organising systems too (as is the human mind), which means that there can be no \u2018officially correct\u2019 level of organisation upon which to predicate understanding.\u00a0 Linear (i.e. \u2018one-level\u2019) interactions between molecules and cells and chemical neurotransmitters in the brain provide us with one perspective, but there is absolutely no justification in assuming this physical<\/em> perspective to be in anyway \u2018primary\u2019 in terms of causation \u2013 which is what we generally (and very naively) do.\u00a0 It is possible to demonstrate another level of description quite easily \u2013 all we need to do in order to radically switch perspectives is to try looking at people, and their mental functioning, in terms of patterns of information<\/em>.<\/p>\n We can get away more easily with treating people as material structures in physical medicine, when a broken bone or an infected ear is plainly asking to be looked at in a physical way.\u00a0 But when the distressing complaint is anxiety, phobia, depression, repetitive \u2018negative thinking\u2019 or compulsive behaviour, it would seem that another mode of perception is being called for.\u00a0 Even though mental illness manifests itself in the realm of perception, thought, feeling and behaviour, psychiatry looks for a solution exclusively on the physical level, which is something that psychiatrists themselves have been heard to question quite frequently.\u00a0 In the following discussion we are going to look at an alternative way of conceptualising \u2018mental illness\u2019: instead of thinking in terms of a linear chain of cause-and-effect which is rooted in a bio-chemical substrate, we will explore the idea that neurotic disturbances occur due to glitches (i.e. invisible and therefore recurrent self-contradictions) in thinking which are manifestations of something that we will call psychological entropy<\/em>.<\/p>\n Psychological entropy is a kind of \u2018information sickness\u2019 rather that a physical sickness.\u00a0 It is not a physical problem \u2013 it is not locatable in any particular level of functioning, and it is therefore not treatable by physical means.\u00a0 What psychological entropy is, in essence, is \u2018ignorance\u2019 \u2013 a sort of mental blind spot that we do not know is there.\u00a0 All of our purposeful activity, without exception, carries this \u2018ignorance\u2019 with it and so we (both collectively and individually) cannot think or act our way out of this particular type of problem.\u00a0 This is why neurosis is so hard to work with \u2013 as Alan Watts says, it is hard t0 \u2018beat neurosis\u2019 because the attempt to beat neurosis is itself neurosis<\/em>.\u00a0 This brings us to a key part of the theory.\u00a0 We are not saying that a person suffering from neurosis is suffering because of his or her mental blind spot, which the rest of us do not have because we are not sick.\u00a0 What we are saying is that the neurotic person is the carrier of our collective blind spot, and that our attempts to fix them (either by drug-therapy or corrective behavioural therapy) actually make them worse.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n This is not a new idea: Jung has said much the same, and more recently, we come across the principle in Batesonian \u2018system theory\u2019 as applied to family therapy.\u00a0 The reason some individuals \u2018volunteer\u2019 to manifest social neurosis is simply because they are single-minded enough to push to the extreme the unconscious glitches assumptions<\/em> (which Gregory Bateson called double-binds<\/em>) that we all buy into on a regular basis.\u00a0 It is only when we take these assumptions to their logical conclusion that the glitch that is inherent in them comes out and grows teeth and claws and turns viciously on us. First the glitch starts to gnaw dainty little chunks out of us here and there, and then it gets ‘business-like’ and eats us up completely!\u00a0 Examples of such fundamentally flawed \u2018basic assumptions\u2019\u00a0 may be set out as follows:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n All of which come down to one key ‘nonsensical or paradoxical assumption’ (or one ‘essential double-bind’), which we might state as:<\/p>\n We can explain the paradoxicality inherent in this last, \u2018essential\u2019 double-bind quite easily: we cannot make a goal of freedom because a goal is a projection of our thinking, and as such it inevitably carries with it thinking\u2019s \u2018blind spot\u2019<\/strong>.<\/em>\u00a0 True freedom \u2013 the genuine article \u2013 is not freedom \u2018in-the-terms-of-thinking\u2019, it is freedom from thought, i.e. freedom from the systematic errors hidden in thought.\u00a0 And as a Zen teacher has said, thought cannot get rid of thoughts, any more than blood can wash away blood.<\/p>\n We shall now assert that the ‘bad’ thing that happens to us as we get older is not<\/em> bodily deterioration, sickness and death, even though physical failure seems unequivocally detrimental to us, but the gradual and imperceptible diminution of mental freedom (which is a quality that we never fully appreciated in the first place).\u00a0 This deterioration of mental freedom tends to be thought of, when we think of it at all, as an inevitable consequence of the process of physical aging, and so this encourages us to concentrate on ‘physical fixing’ even more, but if we were to think about it carefully enough we might be inclined more to the view (espoused in Eastern systems such as yoga and tai’chi) that whether we become mentally less flexible as we become older is due to the way in which we live our lives, and is not something that ‘just happens’ as a result of biological factors.<\/p>\n ‘Deterioration of mental freedom’ can be explained as a process by which there occurs a increasing rigidity of thinking, an accumulation of habits, opinions and beliefs, and a general loss of curiosity about what life is really about.\u00a0 We can better express this erosion of freedom in terms of an ever-growing preoccupation with (or attachment to) a proliferating mass of insignificant or trivial concerns<\/strong>; in other words as a gradual loss of perspective<\/strong>.<\/em>\u00a0 Because of this insidious loss of perspective there comes a type of uneasy fussiness that leads on to anxiety, and a constant, exhausting, self-defeating activity directed towards fixing problems that don’t actually need to be fixed.\u00a0 It leads, in short, to an unhappy, neurotic mode of existence.\u00a0 neurosis means that we are no longer concerned about the ‘Big Picture’ (life itself, in all its grandeur and mystery) because our attention is held captive by the ‘small picture’ of our neurotic concerns.\u00a0 The ‘small picture’ can therefore be thought of as a sort of inferior substitute or surrogate for actual living, which is an idea one comes across both in Jung, and in later writers in psychotherapy.<\/p>\n Mental freedom is not an abstract idea but an immediately obvious quality – it shows itself through humour, spontaneity, unself-conscious happiness, unmanipulative love for others, and a child-like curiosity about what is going on.\u00a0 The lack<\/em> of mental freedom(which is what we are going to explore in terms of psychological entropy) shows itself visibly<\/em> on our faces as stress, seriousness, worry and self-absorption and it manifests itself\u00a0 in our personalities as an exhausting type of ‘flatness’ that comes as a result of being preoccupied with one’s petty agendas.\u00a0 Lack of mental freedom is when curiosity is substituted for by suspiciousness, which is an inferior or degenerate version of curiosity.\u00a0 In a nutshell, we can define the lack<\/em> of mental freedom as:<\/p>\n If one were inclined to doubt the prevalence of psychological entropy, one need only spend a day wandering around looking the city at the faces of those walking by.\u00a0 Which camp do most faces fall into – are they narrowly goal-fixated, preoccupied with the humdrum tasks of everyday life, or are they unattached and free, conscious of the wonder that comes with seeing the bigger picture of life?\u00a0 This is an easy experiment to perform, and it is one that tends to provide pretty unambiguous data:\u00a0 what we see is that it is only small children who look as if they are genuinely present in the moment, whilst the vast majority of adults look totally preoccupied with their ‘grown-up’ concerns.\u00a0 Now and again we see mature people who look free and happy but these individuals are the exception rather than the rule.\u00a0 As has often been noted, as we get older we seem to lose touch with the most important thing in life – our sense of wonder that we are here at all.\u00a0 Instead of marvelling at this astounding and utterly unaccountable fact, we simply take it for granted, and spend our time complaining about the details.\u00a0 If it<\/em> is the insidious onset of mental rigidity and an involuntary fixation of attention upon spuriously important issues that is the biggest problem in mental health, and the root cause of all neurotic mental distress, then what exactly are we doing about it?\u00a0 Are we doing anything about it at all?<\/p>\n Medical science concentrates its efforts upon ameliorating or reversing physical deterioration by returning the biological functions to within their normatively defined limits.\u00a0 Similarly, psychiatry has its aim the reinstatement (as far as is possible) of normal psychological functioning.\u00a0 What psychiatry is not concerned with is anything that is not connected to its goal of intervening on the level of the physical substrate – the idea that neurosis is only ever ‘solved’ by the unqualified abandonment of all our narrow goal-orientated thinking, and all of our narrow goal-orientated behaviour is one that is just too bizarre to countenance for most of us.\u00a0 The problem isn’t that we aren’t good enough at ‘fixing’, the problem is our over-powering tendency to want to fix everything that upsets us – the problem is our obsessive, anxiety-driven, goal-orientated fixing.\u00a0 Psychotherapist P. Scott Peck has said (as has Jung) that the problem is our unacknowledged lack of courage, our refusal to experience legitimate pain.\u00a0 Somehow, we have made a virtue out of avoiding the issue.<\/p>\n Physical medicine is arguably reasonably successful in what it seeks to do, although high-tech interventions seem to have run into problems with the ‘law of diminishing returns’. Psychiatry – to most of us – also appears to be making headway.\u00a0 Although still unable to convincingly explain the roots of mental illness, it seems at least to be heading in the right direction and doing a pretty good job of managing the most distressing symptoms in the meantime, almost exclusively by the use of psychotherapeutic drugs.\u00a0 But does psychiatry really know what it is doing?\u00a0 Or is it a case of \u2018the Emperor’s New Clothes\u2019, with none of us brave enough to be first to say something?\u00a0 There is a view point which says that by assuming that mental illness can, we have made a very grave error.\u00a0 Suppose mental illness is not merely the equivalent of a ‘functional’ disturbance to the operation of an organ or an organ-system?\u00a0 If mental illness is not at all analogous to physical illness, then by putting all our money on that particular horse, we have committed ourselves to a road that goes nowhere.\u00a0 There is not really any doubt that we have committed ourselves to a model of mental illness that is based on strict linear causality.\u00a0 This fact has been remarked upon within psychiatry.\u00a0 Popular science writer James Gleick (1987, p298) reports on psychiatrist Arnold Mandell’s comments, delivered at the 1986 Conference on Chaos in Medicine and Biology:<\/p>\n To Mandell, the discoveries of chaos dictate a shift in clinical approaches to treating psychiatric disorders.\u00a0 By any objective measure, the modern business of ‘psychopharmacology’ – the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia – has to be judged a failure.\u00a0 Few patients, if any, are cured.\u00a0 The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows.\u00a0 Mandell offered his colleagues a chilling assessment of the most commonly used drugs.\u00a0 Phenthiazines, prescribed for schizophrenics, make the fundamental disorder worse.\u00a0 Tricyclic antidepressants “increase the rate of mood cycling, leading to long-term increases in numbers of relapsing psychopathologic episodes”, and so on.\u00a0 Only lithium has an real medical success, Mandell said, and only for some disorders.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Gleick goes on to explain why traditional approaches must inevitably seem inadequate to psychiatrists, who, like Mandell, are able to think in non-linear terms:<\/p>\n As he saw it, the problem was conceptual.\u00a0 Traditional methods for treating this “most unstable, dynamic, infinite-dimensional machine” were linear and reductionist.\u00a0 “The underlying paradigm remains: one gene [maps onto] one peptide [maps onto] one enzyme\u00a0[maps onto] one neurotransmitter\u00a0\u00a0[maps onto] one receptor\u00a0 [maps onto] one animal behaviour [maps onto] one clinical syndrome\u00a0 [maps onto] one drug [maps onto] one clinical rating scale.\u00a0 It dominates almost all research and treatment in psychopharmacology.\u00a0 More than 50 transmitters, thousands of cell types, complex electromagnetic phenomenology, and continuous instability based autonomous activity at all levels – and still the brain is thought of as a chemical point-to-point switchboard.\u00a0 To someone exposed to the world of non-linear dynamics the response could only be: how naive.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The point is that we cannot model mental functioning without taking into account non-linear processes, i.e. without taking into account emergence <\/em>as well as linear causality.\u00a0 If change is linear<\/em> then there is ‘preservation of the original proportionalities’, which means that there is no new information coming into the system.\u00a0 If change is non-linear<\/em>, then the original ratios are lost – this is not just a ‘reshuffling’ but radical reorientation.\u00a0 new stuff comes into the picture, which means that what we are talking about is emergence<\/em>.\u00a0 Emergence comes about through ungrounded instability<\/em>, which is when a system doesn’t merely change its output according to perceived changes in its environment, but when the change in output feeds back into the blueprint of the system itself and alters that blueprint beyond recognition.\u00a0 Linear systems work on the principle of negative feedback<\/em>, which means that errors in the output are identified and corrected.\u00a0 Non-linear systems do what they do because of the operation of positive feedback<\/em>, which means that errors in the output get fed back into the system and repeatedly amplified so that they change the basic organisation of that system in a radical (or unpredictable) way.<\/p>\n Given the well-known time lag between physics and other sciences such as biology (and medicine), and the great resistance that there was to chaos theory in physics in the 1980’s when it first started to make itself known, it is not surprising that we are so slow to take in the implications of this new paradigm in the fields of psychology and psychiatry.\u00a0 Non-linear dynamics challenges our pre-conceptions to the very core – in fact it reverses<\/em> our basic expectations about the world.\u00a0 If we did not know better, we would naturally assume that positive feedback (amplification of errors) can lead to nothing but meaningless static, zero information in other words, but what the study of non-linear systems shows us is that the reverse can happen- instability can lead to the system regrouping on a more highly organised level, not the other way around.\u00a0 There is an information jump, not a drop.\u00a0 The classic example of this is the Mandelbrot set which has been described as ‘the most complex object in existence’.\u00a0 The Mandelbrot set is not specified<\/em> (i.e. described) by the equation Z\u00a0 maps onto<\/strong>\u00a0 Z 2<\/sup> + C<\/strong>, this equation merely ‘facilitates’ a particular line in emergence by instigating ungrounded instability.\u00a0 We think of linear systems, on the other hand, as being progressive in the sense that they are continually moving in the direction of increased information content.\u00a0 The reverse of this is true – no new information ever comes into a system exhibiting linear change, they are utterly tautological and never say anything new.\u00a0 The psychological implications of this are immense -we are forced to confront David Bohm’s spooky vision of the rational<\/em> (i.e. linear) mind as a dealer in illusions, forever offering up visions of progress, new ways of looking at the world which are actually only ‘reshuffled’ versions of the same old thing.\u00a0 The ‘no win situation’ that is neurosis arises precisely out of this disguised tautology because all the ‘solutions’ that our rational mind offers up are in fact reshuffled versions of the original problem.\u00a0 The (purely rational) attempt to come up with and apply a solution is the very root of the problem that the neurotic mind seeks to eradicate:\u00a0 the attempt to fix the problem is the problem, not the problem itself.\u00a0 The problem isn’t actually fixable at all in the end anyway, and, what is more, if I didn’t keep trying to fix it then it wouldn’t keep aggravating me<\/em>.\u00a0 If I left it alone it would stop demanding a solution.\u00a0 As long as I keep driving myself mad trying to fix the problem then I don’t ever get enough perspective to see that – I don’t ever get enough perspective to see that ‘the problem’ isn’t the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n \n \u00a01<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/td>\n
\n IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE HAPPY ON PURPOSE<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n \n 2<\/span> <\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/td>\n
\n IT IS POSSIBLE TO AVOID UNHAPPINESS ON PURPOSE<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n \n 3<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/td>\n
\n IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE ‘GOOD’ ON PURPOSE<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n \n 4<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<\/td>\n
\n IT IS POSSIBLE TO ‘BE YOURSELF’ ON PURPOSE<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
IT IS POSSIBLE TO ATTAIN FREEDOM ON PURPOSE<\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\n
Know Your Enemy<\/strong><\/h2>\n
A FIXATION UPON ARBITRARY GOALS, ALONG WITH THE INABILITY TO QUESTION JUST HOW IMPORTANT THESE GOALS REALLY ARE.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
Putting Our Money On The Wrong Horse<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Entropy As ‘Unavailable Information’<\/strong><\/h2>\n