Psychotherapy East & West. Alan Watts
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to comment on the paradox. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and you mustn’t realize it. Bateson has suggested that the individual who finds himself in a family situation which imposes the double-bind upon him in an acute form is liable to schizophrenia.* For if he cannot comment on the contradiction, what can he do but withdraw from the field? Yet society does not allow withdrawal; the individual must play the game. As Thoreau said, wherever you may seek solitude men will ferret you out “and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.” Thus in order to withdraw, the individual must imply that he is not withdrawing, that his withdrawal is happening, and that he cannot help himself. In other words, he must “lose his mind” and become insane.
But as “genius is to madness close allied,” the schizophrenic withdrawal is a caricature of liberation, including even the “lamasery” of the insane asylum or the peculiarly exempt status of the old-fashioned village idiot. As the terminology of Zen Buddhism implies, the liberated man also has “no mind” (wu-hsin) and does not feel himself to be an agent, a doer of deeds. So also it is said in the Bhagavadgita:
The man who is united with the Divine and knows the truth thinks “I do nothing at all,” for in seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, walking, sleeping, breathing; in speaking, emitting, grasping, opening and closing the eyes he holds that only the senses are occupied with the objects of the senses.24
But in liberation this comes to pass not through an unconscious compulsion but through insight, through understanding and breaking the double-bind which society imposes. One does not then get into the position of not being able to play the game; one can play it all the better for seeing that it is a game.
The schizophrenic withdrawal affects a minority, and it occurs in circumstances in which the double-bind imposed by society in general is compounded by special types of double-bind peculiar to a special family situation.* The rest of us are in differing degrees of neurosis, tolerable to the extent to which we can forget the contradiction thrust upon us, to which we can “forget ourselves” by absorption in hobbies, mystery novels, social service, television, business, and warfare. Thus it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are accepting a definition of sanity which is insane, and that as a result our common human problems are so persistently insoluble that they add up to the perennial and universal “predicament of man,” which is attributed to nature, to the Devil, or to God himself.
If what has been said up to this point is intelligible, it is only partly so; otherwise the reader would have been liberated forthwith! As I have suggested, there are unavoidable verbal difficulties even in describing the paradox we are in, let alone in describing the actual field pattern in which human life takes place. The trouble is that we are describing the difficulty with the very language structure that gets us into it. It has to say, “We are describing” and “Gets us into it,” confirming at every step the reality of the agent-entity presumed to stand behind the activity, or to be enduring it when it is understood to be coming from some other source. Common sense balks at the notion of action without agent just as it balks at the idea of pattern without substance, whether material or mental. But 1 + 2 = 3 and x – y = z are intelligible statements of relation without our having to ask what any of the symbols stand for, whether things or events, solids or spaces.
Thus the whole difficulty of both psychotherapy and liberation is that the problems which they address lie in the social institutions in whose terms we think and act. No cooperation can be expected from an individual ego which is itself the social institution at the root of the trouble. But these institutions are observable; we do not have to ask, “By whom?” They are observable here, for, as William James pointed out, “The word ‘I’ . . . is primarily a noun of position like ‘this’ and ‘here.’”25 If they are observable they are subject to comment, and it is the ability to comment upon it that breaks the double-bind. On the one hand, social institutions like the grid of language create, or better, translate, the world in their terms, so that the world — life itself — appears to be self-contradictory if the terms are self-contradictory. On the other hand, social institutions do not create the world ex nihilo. They are in and of the pattern of nature which they in turn represent or misrepresent.
The pattern of nature can be stated only in terms of a language; but it can be shown in terms of, say, sense perceptions. For a society whose number system is only “1, 2, 3, many,” it cannot be a fact that we have ten fingers, and yet all the fingers are visible. People who know, for whom it is a fact, that they are egos or that the sun goes around the earth can be shown that their facts are wrong by being persuaded to act consistently upon them. If you know that the earth is flat, sail consistently in one direction until you fall off the edge. Similarly, if you know that you are an independent agent, do something quite independently, be deliberately spontaneous, and show me this agent.
That there is a pattern of nature can be shown; what it is can be stated, and we can never be certain that what we have stated is finally correct because there is nothing about which we can act consistently forever. But when we are employing institutions in whose terms we cannot act consistently, we may be sure either that they are self-contradictory or that they do not fit the pattern of nature. Self-contradictions which are not observed and patterns of nature which the language screens out are, in psychological terms, unconscious and repressed. Social institutions are then in conflict with the actual pattern of the man-in-the-world, and this comes out as distress in the individual organism, which cannot be inconsistent with itself or with nature without ceasing to exist. Freud was therefore right as far as he went in tracing neurosis to the conflict between sexual feeling and the peculiar sexual mores of Western cultures. But he was only scratching the surface. For one thing, his view of the sexual “instinct” itself was heavily conditioned by those very mores. As Philip Rieff has said:
Not only did Freud employ sexuality to deflate the pride of civilized man, he further defined it pejoratively by those qualities which make the sexual instinct intractable to a civilized sensibility. . . .While urging, for the sake of our mental health, that we dispense with such childish fantasies of purity as are epitomized in the belief that Mother (or Father) was too nice to have done those nasty things, Freud at the same time comes to the tacit understanding that sex really is nasty, an ignoble slavery to nature.26
For another, Freud’s interpretation of the id and its libido as blind and brutish urges was simply a reflection of the current philosophy that the world is basically “mere” energy, a sort of crude volatile stuff, rather than organic pattern — which is, after all, another name for intelligence.
But what our social institutions repress is not just the sexual love, the mutuality, of man and woman, but also the still deeper love of organism and environment, of Yes and No, and of all those so-called opposites represented in the Taoist symbol of the yang-yin, the black and white fishes in eternal intercourse. It is hardly stretching a metaphor to use the word “love” for intimate relationships beyond those between human organisms. In those states of consciousness called “mystical” we have, I believe, a sudden slip into an inverse or obverse of the view of the world given in our divisive language forms. Where this slip is not, as in schizophrenia, a tortured withdrawal from conflict, the change of consciousness again and again brings the overwhelming impression that the world is a system of love. Everything fits into place in an indescribable harmony — indescribable because paradoxical in the terms which our language provides.
Now our language forms, our grids of thought, are by no means wholly wrong. The differences and divisions in the world which they note are surely there to be seen. There are indeed some mere ghosts of language, but in the main the categories of language seem to be valid and indeed essential to any description of the world whatsoever — as far as they go. But a given language cannot properly express what is implicit in it — the unity of differences, the logical inseparability of light and darkness, Yes and No. The question is whether these logical implications correspond to physical relations. The whole trend of modern science seems to be establishing the fact that, for the most part, they do. Things