Centre for Training in Psychotherapy -- Orientation 2008

Dear friends, there are a few occasions each year when the whole school--students, graduates and faculty are invited to gather together--Graduation, What is Psychotherapy day and Orientation. The focus of tonight's gathering, as the name indicates, is to welcome our new students and share with them something of the spirit and orientation of our school.

Orientation evokes the idea of our place in space and the purposeful direction of our journey. Charles Taylor in his classic The Sources of the Self defines the human self as the one who orients him or herself in relation to questions about the good.

Now the C.T.P. twenty years on has an orientation that is the result--our glory and our burden--of innumerable choices of the faculty towards a good. Our purpose has been to create an essential and best possible training for psychodynamic therapists.

We stated at the beginning that we ourselves are a group of life-long learners. We continue to work with clients of our own and all of us are reading and thinking, talking and arguing about the human condition and the work of therapy. So you new students are the latest to be invited into a collegiality with a group of life-long learners.

I will mention two signature characteristics of your learning at C.T.P. One is the emphasis we place on group therapy. The other is that we study directly the texts of selected important therapists and theoreticians.

I will highlight one particular intentionality that lies behind these two choices.

Human beings love to generalize and they love a system of generalized knowledge. Naturally enough! Because we can’t begin to make our way in the world without learning from others the words for things (general ideas) and the way everybody knows how things hang together and make sense. We can’t survive or mature humanly without categories and without an initial shared view of the world.

History shows us however that this necessity can lead us astray into the assumption that with a few general ideas or words (a definition) we have grasped the essence of something. Secondly we can be led astray into a love of a conceptual/language system for its own beautiful sake.

Besides, faced with the overwhelming riches and complexity of what has gone before in human culture, the stoutest individual learner can easily quail and be tempted to beg for a quick simplified summary of the Truth.

The therapy group is able to be a wonderful corrective to all these perils. Firstly it changes the paradigm of knowledge itself.

Our forefathers put a lock on what knowledge is by looking at astronomical objects and generalizing about their motions. (Now there’s a generalization for you!). This meant for them that they were finding out the intentions of God or the gods. Its result in history was that knowledge came to be understood as the possession of a set of true propositions.

What the experience of the group does is subversively restore a different view of human knowledge as coming from the encounter of two human beings--something every mother knows.

We offer our narrative to the other with the use of general words and we hear the other's words. But we are constantly reminded that the particular and unique person who speaks is always more than her words or your words express.

So in a group we are each held to the particular, to the unique person, and we are constantly reminded to stay open, to leave room for the new, the unexpected, the unknowable. Every word we use stays open for expansion and never closes off as if adequate to what is named or referred to.

We are not cast down into skepticism here. We have the confidence we gained as children that we are truly connecting, uniting with this other person, for we are present to them as they are in their fullness and we hold our words lightly and open.

Besides the group therapy, your first two years at C.T.P. introduce you to classic texts by selected major therapists and theoreticians.

The perils I mentioned earlier--over confident generalization, the seduction of system for its own sake, the frightened wish for a simple summary of what’s true--all of them press upon us here in a more powerful way. And we are dealing with writers who are passionately trying to achieve systematic thinking about the human condition and its suffering.

The learner finds they often disagree or at least are worlds apart in their language and way of thinking.

Furthermore we can only read a little of each. Are we trying to drive you crazy? No.

The disagreements remind us to avoid closed conviction, to hold conviction open to amendment or completion. Besides, disagreements that seemed irreconcilable in 1914 ( Freud-Jung), 1940 (Anna Freud-Melanie Klein), 1970 (Freudians-Self Psychology), after decades of controversy and some ecumenical writing of the kind that a Stephen Mitchell did, seem to yield a great deal, if not totally, to complementarity.

Opponents in controversy tend to oversimplify and even caricature the opposing view, so it is important for us to go to the classic texts directly.

Now as I said we read only a little of each. This keeps us humble, for we must read a great deal more than is possible in two years, to have a developed and nuanced sense of any one author. So you are reminded that you are beginning a life-long journey of learning.

But the overriding reason for our use of originary or classic texts brings us back to what I said about group therapy. For in the classic texts we see not only the passion for synthesis and systematic knowledge, we see theoreticians in live contact with their therapeutic work, their encounters with their clients, out of which their theory flows.

As in the group where we are constantly reminded that the persons and the encounters have an existential fullness that cannot be contained in words. So as we read Freud on Dora we remind ourselves that the existential fullness of these two persons and their encounters far transcends the words and interpretations that Freud struggles to write for us. We find ourselves arguing with him as if we were there and then fall silent because we were not.

Even the theoreticians who were not therapists, Heidegger and William James, are trying with all their might to hold themselves to what is phenomenologically present and is immediate to experience. And both know our words fail us.

So welcome, old friends, to this reminder of why we chose group therapy and the study of many classic texts. And welcome, new students, to the beginning of a unique and exciting life-long journey of heart and mind.

Philip McKenna

September 3^rd 2008

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I am posting this Orientation address which I gave to the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy because it shows, in the context of psychotherapy, certain principles of knowledge and language use that become quite critical for our journey (via) in theology.

1. All our knowledge begins as encounter with a living person. She is our universe, our "all." You might argue that this is an illusion, and many psychoanalysts have chosen to use this term while insisting that it is a necessary illusion in the infant to ward off any awareness of its utter helplessness. To focus on the imperfection and illusory nature of infant experience risks missing the fertile truth potential in originary experience. Thus it is generally held that animism is the earliest form of religion. All things have souls or everything is alive. Everything is "full of gods" as Thales the presocratic said. Later, astronomy is the science of what God or gods are doing in or through the heavenly bodies: for successful agriculture we need to know. And in monotheism a loving, personal Creator "holds" all things and all persons in being and draws them through time to union with God's self. Now all these human elaborations of meaning will naturally evoke a wordless echo of our original encounter, gaining analogical force and richness from this evocation.

Monotheism, as here described, can at once be seen as an elaboration of the originary experience and a "purification" of animism and early cosmic theology. Negative theology moves in the same direction, gradually removing (via remotionis) reliance on anthropomorphisms. This context reminds us to privilege, at the human end of the via negativa, a posture of journeying that is itself encounter and a movement towards a final encounter. Theology is not first of all a set of propositions. Because of human limitation we cannot stay constantly in the prayer mode of encounter and presence: At appropriate times the work with words and concepts, propositions and reasoning, Scripture and Tradition, claims our full attention. Our larger prior intention includes this within our Way.

2. I referred to holding concepts "open" in our thinking. I came across this idea while reading Humberto Eco's dialogue with Cardinal Martini (Belief or Non-belief: a Confrontation, Arcade Pub. 2000). Think of the concept of "the heavens." We are aware of galaxies and light years, so we can see clearly how our ancestors, pointing to the same "heavens" as we do, would have been wise to have kept some room for completion or correction of their concept. I can easily imagine we know as little about the human brain as our ancestors knew about the heavens... Moreover, we must hold our concepts open, not only across history but interpersonally as well. The concept of a concept is itself an abstraction. Each person using the concept of the human brain will arguably have a discernibly different "core" to their instantiation of the concept--not to mention the virtually limitless sets of different associations surrounding each person's use.

What we have said applies also to propositions and whole texts, with the added complication that texts float loose from their author into the future, suffering cultural and grammatological vicissitudes as well. The text, like the concept, is an abstraction.

Given that our paradigm of knowledge is encounter, we are not dismayed by these limitations.We are already predisposed to know the inadequacies of human thought and language. That any thing and any human transcends our knowledge makes us ready for the incomprehensibility and the ineffability of the divine.

Kenosis

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8)

You emptied yourself, taking the form of a servant (that is, the lowest among us). The crucial point is that you took on the form of human being. You say “form of a servant or slave” lest anyone think (stupidly) that if you took on the form of a king, a lord, a genius, a superb athlete, that it might be an appropriate union, a congruence of the best with the best. The Greek gods took human form, made love to humans, had human children, but the gulf was not infinite.

When the gulf between your divine life and your creature’s human life is infinite, then any taking of our form is an emptying of your self, crossing an infinite difference and binding your infinite self within the human being that we see and hear and touch. Imagine how our human being would be utterly consumed by coming close to the energy of one sun, or even one lightning bolt. Yet somehow you graciously come to us in human form without consuming that human form or consuming us who come in contact with you.

You come to us not in the light, fire and thunder of your immeasurable power and glory, but in the sheer silence of an easily deniable, easily missed presence as divine presence of the human Jesus (cp. I Kings 19:12). Jesus, you are and have all that a human being is and has. If your human being was not, so to speak, held open to union with your divine person, you would be a human person and a human being as each of us is. As it is, you are a human being who is a divine person.

When you became human you didn’t only become ‘flesh’, you became subject of a human culture, you became thinker in and speaker of a human language. So you as Word of God emptied yourself and took on the form of human language. This relationship of you as Word to the words you spoke to your disciples becomes our splendid light for understanding the sacred scriptures. When you, Jesus, as present speaker remove yourself from among us, you promise that the Spirit will lead us into all the truth we need, will lead us to understand the human words of the scripture, so that we connect to your person as Word of God, as Truth and as Way.

Now the author of Philippians, just before he quotes the early hymn (?) we have been considering, says: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God…” (Phil 2:5). This makes me think that by our union with you--whereby we become your Body and the same mind is in us as is in you—what happens for us is the opposite of the kenosis (the emptying). We become, rather, lifted up, filled; our bodily life an expression of the presence of your Spirit, our speaking and writing also a kind of sacred scripture, a manifestation of you as Word. This is especially true when we bring the actual sacred scripture to expression in our own time and place. But it is also true in a secondary sense of all our speech, for we are always members of your Body and you are present to our time and place through us, and not least, through our speaking.

This means that every truth we utter brings light to the world and that light is ultimately and immediately a participation in you—Light from Light, true God from true God. Every act of love, every task done, every work of art is a manifestation in this time and place of your love and your creative doing.

The promise is that You will be all in all. Not that we cease to be ourselves, but that ourselves and our doing are all transformed and illumined by being in you.

Beings and being

Beings and being

I’ve been reading Martin Heidegger’s The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (translation, introduction, and lexicon by Albert Hofstadter; revised edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: UP, 1982). A course of lectures from 1927 and first published in German in 1975, it constitutes a sequel to Being and Time. It is easier to read for the non-German speaker since Heidegger is here at pains to relate his thinking to the terminology and texts of earlier philosophers, including the Scholastics.

“This concept of existence, Dasein, corresponds in Kant to the Scholastic term existentia. Kant therefore often uses the expression “Existenz,” “actuality” [“Wirklichkeit”], instead of “Dasein.” . . .For what Kant calls existence, using either Dasein or Existenz, and what Scholasticism calls existentia, we employ the terms “Vorhandensein,”“being-extant,” “being-at-hand,” or “Vorhandenheit,” “extantness.” . . For us, in contrast, the word “Dasein” does not designate, as it does for Kant, the way of being of natural things. It does not designate a way of being at all, but rather a specific being which we ourselves are, the human Dasein.” (p.28)

Heidegger reserves “Existenz,” ”existence,” to designate the way of being of Dasein. “Therefore, we might, for example, say ‘A body does not exist; it is rather, extant.’ In contrast, we ourselves, are not extant; Dasein exists. But the Dasein and bodies as respectively existent or extant at each time are.” (p.28)

Note that final “are” which is italicized. That “are” escapes the specificity of mode that Heidegger finds (or imposes) in “exists” or “is at hand.” I would argue that this is the “are” that metaphysics is about.

Let us consider some simple distinctions in English usage.

1. ”Being” (being1) that keeps its verb side dominant, as in “The retreat master recommended being rather than doing.” “Existing” is a near equivalent, with the (philosophic) advantage of being distinguishable from the abstract noun form “existence”. “Being” is used in both ways, as “existing” and “existence”.

2. So we have “being” (being2), that is to being1 as “existence” is to “existing”.

3. “Being” (being3) holds itself to the noun or substantive side. It admits of singular and plural---“a being,” ”those beings.” So those beings3, all of whom have being2, are the ones who set themselves to obey the retreat master with regard to ”being1 rather than doing.”

Basically then we have things (including persons) which exist, and both the things and their existing are named from being (being1). A further distinction arises on the “thing” side. This is mostly a distinction that answers a philosopher’s question. When they asked themselves about the “what” of the being (thing) that exists, they found the need to distinguish what it essentially is from what it only happens to be. So what a thing essentially is (“always, already”) is said to be the being4 of the being3.

4. ”Being” (being4) is the “constitution, nature, essence” (Concise OED) of a being3. So the whole being3 who is Joe has a being4 which is his essence as a man and leaves aside the inessentials such as his height or hair colour. Being4 is that whereby the being3 is what it is essentially.

Heidegger consistently uses “Dasein” as a substantive, the subject of human actions, being3. "Sein" the German verb "to be" is also used in German as a neuter substantive for "being" "existence" and "essence". Until Heidegger, "Dasein" was used as a substantive to mean "existence" or "life."

Humbrecht on St.Thomas' Negative Theology

In 2005 J. Vrin of Paris published a book destined to be a classic in the increasingly rich literature on negative theology. Thierry-Dominique Humbrecht O.P. is the author of Theologie Negative et Noms Divins Chez Saint Thomas D'Aquin (negative theology and the divine names in st. thomas aquinas). Below I have imperfectly translated the blurb he wrote on the back of the book.

"Negative Theology attempts to designate all we are unable to say about God. Do the perfections attributed to God (like being, goodness, wisdom etc.) truly reach God or should they be left aside? Are they the locus for a work of speculation or rather for a mystical union in the ineffable? Why is the vocabulary of “negative theology” absent from so many authors?

Negative theology has become the object of renewed research. The [study of] Platonism and its reception, of the medieval authors, and above all the Heideggarian reading of the history of metaphysics have run together [in this direction.]

Is there a negative theology in St. Thomas’ work and, if so, of what kind? “Concerning God, we do not know what God is but only what God is not”. This Thomistic formula which has become emblematic comes from Plotinus. So is Thomas original? To know, we must situate him among his contemporaries.

Furthermore ,the danger is to consider only some famous texts instead of considering how they fit in the [various] works and how each work fits in his whole corpus.

A study of the whole remains to be done.

God, says Thomas is “completely unknown” to us. However his negative theology seems rather to be a negative way, an ensemble of negative modalities which function to correct and confirm the primacy of positive predication of the divine perfections."

Rahner "favoured an apophatic way of speaking about God".

The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, edited by Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines (Cambridge University Press, 2005) contains 18 excellent chapters on his work and a 19th which is Rahner's last talk before he died (1984). In it he describes four "experiences" he considered crucial to theological work. The first, which he clearly signals as the most important, he titles "Analogical Affirmations". It goes without saying, he argues, that for a Catholic theologian theological statements are analogical. This means that any thing affirmative we say about God must always be negated in some sense.
He says theologians too often make a formal bow to the incomprehensibility of God and then go forward with a confident affirmative discourse that effectively "forgets" that all our affirmations are under a cloud of radical inadequacy.
Rahner sees theology as a collegial work within the Christian community in response to God's self-communication in Jesus Christ: an intellectual work that engages the whole self (heart and mind) in moving towards a union that is totally beyond words. The negation that covers all our affirmative words (given to us by God in the first place) marks the place on the way where we stand before the Mystery and surrender all our human language and understanding to a judgement of inadequacy. The image here is not of a theology that is a closed system but of a theology that is a journey or way through the best that the human mind and heart can manage into the incomprehensible Mystery.

*the quote in the title is from the translators' introduction: C.C. p.297

*besides the negation that marks the point of passage away from language altogether,we need to write about the way negation appropriately enters constantly into the fabric of the theological discourse. More later

Theology as a Way

A few years ago in a, perhaps feverish, reflection on a hospital bed, I thought of the first example we have of a theological discussion. In Genesis 3 the serpent asked the woman,

"'Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?' The woman answered the serpent, 'We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said,"You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death"'. Then the serpent said to the woman, 'No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.' The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give." (Gen.3:1-6, Jerusalem Bible)

The J.B. titles the chapter "The Fall" and it occurred to me that the Fall already happened in their theological discussion, for they were talking about God as if God was not present. Adam, by the way, is not off the hook, as he was "with her" (v.6) and his silence was a distinct and complicit participation, as was clear from what followed.

One thing our first theologians do get right (for all their bad faith and rationalisation of desire) is that they understand their discussion to be leading to decisive and momentous action. Their discussion is guiding their way forward and is an integal and decisive part of their human process forward in time (their moral or spiritual journey).

The early Christians called their sect "the Way" ( Acts 24:14) and considered themselves "followers of the Way" (Acts 9:2). Not surprising, as Jesus did a lot of purposive travelling and called his disciples to "follow", to take up their cross and follow. The great advantage of this metaphor is that it leads us to consider our whole self, in all its activity, over a whole lifetime, as moving towards a full union with our loving God. We are not asked (and graced) to do just this or that, we are asked (and graced) to do everything in and towards God. Already in Acts the metaphor is supple enough to embrace this deepest of spiritual meanings and also to evoke the destiny of the whole community. Jesus had brought his "good news" to a people who understood themselves as saved by an Exodus and a Return from Exile, two Ways. This all culminates in Jesus' offer to be the Way (for us) (John 14:6).
There is a great advantage in seeing theology as a "via", as a part or one form of the Christian Way. It reminds us that theology, to be part of the Christian Way, must have all the character of total engagement, must be done in the presence of God, must be a discourse about the way forward and about the God who draws us to union. On this Way and in the Way (Jesus), we are spoken to, addressed. Our hearing, the work of understanding, and the discourse of our response happen in faith, confession, liturgy, contemplative prayer and theology. (Our full hearing issues in "doing" the works of necessity, creative works, and the works of love and justice). In my first fervour about this, I concluded that theology to be true to its nature should always be in the second person, an address to God in the manner of St. Augustine's Confessions. I'll write later about why I don't think so now.

Negative Theology

All my adult life I have been interested in the Christian tradition of the Via Negativa (the negative way) or negative theology as it is also commonly called. In 1968 I did a philosophy thesis at the University of Toronto entitled " The Logic of Religious Language-- a second order study of Christian language and of the key role within it of the via negativa ." From 1970 to the present I have been practicing psychodynamic psychotherapy and since 1985 teaching at the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy< www.ctp.net > In 2001, I decided to spend one day a week in the library,reviving my theological study of the via negativa. I hope to use this site to share reflections and short essays, and to offer some annotated bibliography.