Happiness

[+ Lucky]

Would you like to know the meaning of life? Can you ever be truly happy? Psychiatrist Allen Wheelis, now in his nineties, has spent a lifetime studying the human mind, and, in his new book, tells you his shocking conclusions. You can save thousands of dollars that would have gone to a therapist just by reading this LA Times book review by Jonathan Kirsch:

 

The Way We Are

Allen Wheelis W.W. Norton: 160 pp., $23.95

 

By Jonathan Kirsch, Jonathan Kirsch is the author of 11 books, including the forthcoming "A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization."

 

 

IN his 90s now, San Francisco psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis has spent a long lifetime in search of the secrets of the human psyche. " 'Say everything that comes to mind,' the analyst says to the analysand, 'nothing must remain hidden,' " he writes in this dark valedictory, "The Way We Are." And yet he is compelled to confess that the whole effort has been futile. "Below the deepest uncovering one yet deeper is possible," he contends. "Dirt is endless. Fur and feces and bones, and ever deeper, but no bedrock."

 

Ironically, Wheelis is best known for "How People Change," a book whose title holds out the cheerful promise of self-improvement. Now he declares himself disillusioned with "the promise of psychology" — the notion that we can achieve happiness if we try hard enough — and he is understandably "obsessed with death," a condition he characterizes as "not a private terror but the unchanging backdrop to the stage of our existence." Prodded by his own terrors and obsessions, he seeks to understand and explain nothing less than "the human condition itself" or, as he puts it in a lyrical moment, "the ways of power and the ways of the heart."

 

"What is the minimum penalty for being a conscious and self-conscious creature living simultaneously in an eternal symbolic world of our own construction and in the natural world in which, looking straight ahead, we see our oncoming death?" This is the question he poses.

 

If you are bummed out by these preliminaries, be forewarned — the book doesn't get any brighter.

 

For example, Wheelis confronts us with the unpleasant but unavoidable fact that life feeds on life, no matter how diligently we distance ourselves from what goes on in the slaughterhouse. "Poet and philosopher sit to meat, speak of love, charity, rights of man, sacredness of life," he muses. "Far away blood flows, cries rise in the night." And he insists that human beings do not simply kill to eat and eat to live: He draws an unbroken line from the abattoir to the worst atrocities human beings are capable of committing. "There is no good man," he concludes. "We all are killers, we live on others."

 

His mind's eye searches anxiously for meaning in human history, ranging from the savannas of prehistoric Africa to the monuments of ancient Egypt to the smoking ruins of Dresden and Hiroshima. His conclusion is that we are not so different, after all, from wild and ravening beasts. "The violence that individuals have given up in the course of becoming orderly and moral has not been eliminated," he writes. "It is passed on; it is handed upward. It collects at the top, in the White House, Number Ten Downing Street, the Reichstag, the Kremlin."

 

Indeed, Wheelis holds that the lower orders of life are far better off than Homo sapiens precisely because, as far as we know, animals are not cursed with self-awareness. "There is no knowledge of death, no watching of one's fateful progression, no history, no vision of one's actual condition," he writes, "hence no need to transcend that condition." After a million years of evolution, the human animal has finally achieved consciousness, but it's all bad news, according to Wheelis. "This is the Fall," he intones. "Culture is about to begin."

 

Culture, according to Wheelis, is only a way of describing the various "schemes" by which humankind seeks to redeem itself from the sure knowledge that life is nasty, brutish and short. "If [man] can find such a scheme and make his life 'mean' something in it, that is, contribute to it, make a difference, he will have ferried something of his mortal self across the gulf of death to become a part of something that will live on." But Wheelis seems to suggest that all such schemes are essentially pretty lies we tell ourselves to hide an unendurable truth. "The immediate horror man perceives is his own death, but beyond that he begins to see the entire life process as carnage, as eating and being eaten," he writes. "A terrible screaming pervades the universe. Man is the first to hear it. This is the vision we cannot accept. It drives toward madness or despair."

 

Wheelis dismisses religion as a collection of failed myths that established moral and sexual boundaries but only until they began losing their power to bedazzle us. "There is no God to establish any position; so every position is arbitrary," he observes. "With no authority beyond humanity, by what standard can we designate anything as absolutely wrong?" Nowadays, the redemptive solace formerly offered by religious rituals can be found in chess playing or stamp collecting. "One seeks distraction," he concedes. "[O]ne may achieve briefly the illusion of mastery. But not for long. Within the confines of a single life, death is unmasterable."

 

When he shifts his gaze from the individual to the community, Wheelis sees even greater moral squalor. "The state would like to eat up all individual power, all independence, discretion, freedom, autonomy," he writes. The stirring words of John F. Kennedy, "Ask not what your country can do for you … ," remind him of Adolf Hitler: "The unison of Sieg Heil by the packed and disciplined masses at Nuremburg, that is what the state wants…."

 

Wheelis pauses now and then to recall a vivid childhood memory or engage in a "thought experiment." He admits to his own struggles with sexual temptation. "I want to be fair to my wife," he allows, "but fair also to myself." At one point, he evokes the pleasures of Cape Cod in August and describes in intimate detail his own fantasies on beholding a scantily clad young woman at play with her baby. "I think she knows she is torturing me, making me want to do with her what she is doing with the baby," he confesses.

 

But even his carnality is the occasion for yet another joyless revelation: "These fantasies are anti-mortality dreams….We all swim upstream against the overpowering current, ever more doomed and desperate, trying at the last moment to throw something ashore, some little thing that will remain, bear witness that we were here."

 

Wheelis may well connect with the audience that made "Everyman," Philip Roth's gloomy contemplation of death, a bestseller. But I suspect he is content merely to wrestle in public with his own devils — "My plight, my curse, my demon, a savage yearning for something I'm never going to get," as he puts it. For the rest of us, "The Way We Are" turns out to be a sobering and even a shattering experience, the heartrending cry of a man who has lived long, seen and done much and ended up in the grip of cold despair.

[+ Charlie]

I know it's all true, but did I need to hear it at 8 o'clock on Monday morning?

[AdamSmith]

It hit me between the eyes at 6am.

 

But after all. One way to view most of Western culture in general and religion in particular is as a sublime lie against time -- the quest for more life, into a time without boundaries.

 

Another who looked at all this was Ernest Becker. Here's a decent summary of his The Denial of Death:

 

"As a cultural anthropologist, Becker was searching for explanations of why human society develops in the way that it does, and he was particularly interested in why human society is so violent, why different social groups are so intolerant and hateful of each other. By the time of writing The Denial of Death, his ninth book, he had reached the conclusion that he had found a very important explanatory principle for understanding human behavior and human culture. This principle, summarized with extreme brevity, is as follows. Human beings are mortal, and we know it. Our sense of vulnerability and mortality gives rise to a basic anxiety, even a terror, about our situation. So we devise all sorts of strategies to escape awareness of our mortality and vulnerability, as well as our anxious awareness of it. This psychological denial of death, Becker claims, is one of the most basic drives in individual behavior, and is reflected throughout human culture. Indeed, one of the main functions of culture, according to Becker, is to help us successfully avoid awareness of our mortality. That suppression of awareness plays a crucial role in keeping people functioning--if we were constantly aware of our fragility, of the nothingness we are a split second away from at all times, we'd go nuts. And how does culture perform this crucial function? By making us feel certain that we, or realities we are part of, are permanent, invulnerable, eternal. And in Becker's view, some of the personal and social consequences of this are disastrous.

 

"First, at the personal level, by ignoring our mortality and vulnerability we build up an unreal sense of self, and we act out of a false sense of who and what we are. Second, as members of society, we tend to identify with one or another "immortality system" (as Becker calls it). That is, we identify with a religious group, or a political group, or engage in some kind of cultural activity, or adopt a certain culturally sanctioned viewpoint, that we invest with ultimate meaning, and to which we ascribe absolute and permanent truth. This inflates us with a sense of invulnerable righteousness. And then, we have to protect ourselves against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others, which we can only do by insisting that all other absolute truths are false. So we attack and degrade--preferably kill--the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute-truth systems. So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce Communists; the Communist Khmer Rouge slaughters all the intellectuals in Cambodia; the Spanish Inquisition tortures heretics; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil. The list could go on and on..."

 

http://faculty.washington.edu/nelgee/lectures/speeches/hughes_1.htm

 

>You can save

>thousands of dollars that would have gone to a therapist just

>by reading this LA Times book review by Jonathan Kirsch

 

Maybe so, maybe not. A shrink I saw for several years acknowledged all this, but had a different take:

 

Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis

 

Cooper, Steven

 

Despite the importance of the concept of hope in human affairs, and especially in all manner of helping relationship, psychoanalysts have long had difficulty accepting responsibility for the manner in which their various interpretive orientations and explanations of therapeutic action express their own hopes for their patients. In point of fact, observes Steven Cooper, analysts have had relatively little to say about the therapeutic role of hope in general. In Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis, Cooper remedies this longstanding lacuna in the literature, and, in the process, provides a thorough comparative analysis of contemporary psychoanalytic models with respect to issues of hope and hopefulness.

 

Cooper's task is challenging, given that the most hopeful aspects of human growth frequently entail acceptance of the destructive elements of our inner lives; objects of hope, after all, may also be objects of disappointment, danger, competition, and envy. The analysis of hope, then, implicates what Cooper sees as a central dialectic tension in psychoanalysis: that between psychic possibility and psychic limit. He argues that analysts have historically had difficulty integrating the concept of limit into a treatment modality so dedicated to the creation and augmentation of psychic possibility. And yet, it is only by accepting the realm of limit as a necessary counterpoise to the realm of possibility and clinically embracing the tension between the two realms that analysts can further their understanding of therapeutic process in the interest of better treatment outcomes.

 

Given the therapeutic realities of possibility and limit, how does hope enter into the analyst's technical decisions? What role does it play in the adoption of particular theories and especially in the visions of therapeutic action inhering in those theories? Addressing these issues from a comparative perspective, Cooper persuasively demonstrates how each psychoanalytic theory - ego psychology, British object relations theory, and American relational theory among them - provides its own logic of hope; this logic, in turn, translates into a distinctive sense of what the analyst may hope for the patient, and what the patient is encouraged to hope for himself or herself.

 

Objects of Hope brings ranging scholarship and refreshing candor to bear on the knotty issue of what can and cannot be achieved in the course of psychoanalytic therapy. It will be valued not only as an exemplary exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, but also as a thoughtful, original effort to place the vital issue of hope at the center of clinical concern.

 

http://www.cavershambooksellers.com/searchresults.php?query=0881632716