25 Apr Phenomenology Is the New Psychology
This this post was originally posted here
If you’ve been following along here over the last few months, the theme of The Trip Report has been “Emergent Paradigms.”
I like to think of this ‘season’ of the newsletter as a high-level survey of scientific findings, technologies, novel trends, and newly emerging ways of seeing that will help us understand the shifting landscapes of health and wellbeing and, of course, tie it all back to our central theme: psychedelics.
Today, we’re looking at the evolution of Western Psychology.
Wish me luck.
As psychedelics continue to penetrate culture, therapy, and science, the emphasis on first-person, direct, subjective experience will become as important as objective, quantifiable measures.
More interestingly (I think), the subjective, first-person, direct experience is already the primary substrate of therapeutic practice is also evolving—from the narrative to the phenomenological.
The modern, Western—and increasingly scientifically informed—view of the mind and psyche is bending towards an understanding increasingly in agreement with the view of the mind/psyche from the East.
We might order the paradigms of Western psychology this way:
The process of psychoanalysis—developed by the legendary Austrian doctor Sigmund Freud in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and arguably the foundational bedrock of Western psychology—principally deals with the past and how it shapes our unconscious.
Psychoanalysis aims to develop a narrative understanding of the past and how it shapes our behaviors, emotions, and identity.
In this view, the past is prologue, and by unearthing the experiences of our formative years and sharing that experience through “the talking cure,” as Freud put it, we are able to get a sense of our story, why we are the way we are, and through this process, we can change.
The psychoanalytic realm deals with our history and our identity, both of which are fundamentally conceptual and narrative.
Where psychoanalysis sees human function as the result of the unconscious mind, the next paradigm of Western psychology—Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—emphasizes the role of unhelpful learned patterns of thinking and behaving.
Psychoanalysis typically involves long-term treatment (often several years), with multiple sessions per week focusing on deep-seated emotional difficulties to uncover underlying patterns in thoughts and behaviors rooted in the past in order to bring about deep psychological change.
CBT aims to change attitudes and behavior by addressing cognitive processes—thoughts, images, beliefs, and attitudes—and how they relate to behavior.
Unlike psychoanalysis, CBT is structured and shorter (e.g., 12 weeks). It is goal-oriented in that it aims to modify thought patterns and behaviors directly through explicit exercises and practices that can instill skills one can employ throughout one’s life.
And like psychoanalysis, the primary substrate for CBT—thinking—is conceptual and abstract and accessed through mental images and mental language.
If psychoanalysis is “the talking cure,” then CBT is “the thinking cure.”
In the 1930s and 40s, Freud’s student Wilhelm Reich developed his idea of “character armor,” which he described as physical tensions linked to psychological defenses.
However, it wasn’t until the 1970s, when the counterculture movement embraced ideas from the East, that body-oriented approaches to psychological and emotional challenges would gain a foothold as a psychotherapeutic modality.
The most adopted somatic theories come from Pat Ogden and Peter Levine, who developed sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic Experiencing, respectively.
Positive therapeutic results combined with the growing body of scientific literature on the neurobiological understanding of trauma and the role of the autonomic nervous system, these somatic approaches have been able to gain wider acceptance.
The body’s fight, flight, and freeze responses—which become dysregulated in traumatized people—are physiological reactions governed by the autonomic nervous system.
These states of arousal are consciously available, not through thinking about them, but through feeling them—hence the role of somatic approaches.
Since the publication of The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, somatic approaches have seemed to become the preferred methodologies of both patients and therapists.
If psychoanalysis is the “talking cure” and CBT is the “thinking cure,” then a somatic approach is the “feeling cure.”
The progression from psychoanalytic to cognitive to somatic marks Western Psychology’s evolution in understanding the human experience as a ‘narrative self’ to what philosopher Thomas Metzinger calls the Phenomenal Self.
That is, both the psychoanalytic story of the past (and how that shows up in patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior) as well as the patterns of thought that direct our behavior, which CBT is concerned with, are accessed through the verbal and imaginative capacities of the mind—they are narratives.
On the other hand, somatic-body-oriented approaches are accessed not through verbal-conceptual routes but through direct felt experience of the body.
Somatic approaches have gained renewed interest as modalities to address trauma and stress-related conditions, which, of course, include a narrative account or memory of traumatic experiences or traumatic periods of one’s life. But the emphasis of these approaches is rooted in the here and now—specifically, the landscape of sensations in the body that are available to conscious awareness: pressure, heaviness, rushing sensation, tension, heat, cold, the beating of the heart, the contraction of the breathing, the pressure in the head.
These phenomena are the substrate of somatic and body-oriented psychotherapeutic approaches and are categorically different from psychoanalytic and cognitive strategies.
If the psychoanalyst asks, “Why do you think that is?” the somatic practitioner asks, “Where do you feel that in your body, what is its quality, and how is it changing?”
These are fundamentally different layers of the stack.
Most people in the modern world live in a world of thought: the world of analysis, weighing options, cause and effect, and story.
We have a story about our identity and how that identity was shaped, namely through our past experiences. The identity has habituated patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior, which is who we are.
In other words, the dominant mode is the narrative self.
But what often goes unnoticed in such a cerebral society is the moment-to-moment experience of preverbal sensations, affect, and stirrings of the body that predate habituated patterns of thinking and reaction.
It is the importance of this ocean of experience to which the therapeutic, scientific, and cultural zeitgeist is orienting.
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