As the failure of capitalism to deliver on its myths becomes more evident and culture wars continue to polarise, Jonathan Fordham looks at how depth psychology and wisdom from the classical world can help us to find meaningful happiness.
I recently came across an interesting book from an unlikely source. Happy, by magician and illusionist Derren Brown. It begins, appositely, with the introduction of a little fella which Brown describes as “ubiquitous. At once irreproachable and black-eyed sinister, he cheers us up for a moment before we sense a sneer. He is the rubber-stamp guarantee of congeniality, designed for contagion: a morale-boosting initiative for a life assurance company in the 1960s, disseminated into the world in the form of fifty black-on-yellow badges.” (1) That’s right. You guessed it. Mr Emoji.
At a certain point in communicating to clients by text within my therapy practician, I identified a subtle internal dilemma questioning the occasional natural impulse to include a smiley face – a dilemma between upbeat positivity and motivation, and the reflective neutrality of a blanker canvas. I haven’t quite resolved this, reserving the right to break any hard and fast rule, but Derren Brown’s succinct insight in the prologue to Happy has stayed with me:
“The desire to be happy, to obtain happiness, to claim our right to be happy, remains the most enduring and conspicuously self-defeating aspect of our modern condition.” (2)
As we wait to see what stories and myths replace the illusionary one, founded on the anthill of consumer capitalism, that buying stuff makes you happy, Derren Brown looks backwards to classical civilization for ancient wisdom in these modern times. In an interesting intersection with modern-day self-help and therapeutic modalities such as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), he quite correctly identifies how beliefs and stories define how we experience ourselves and our realities. Similar to John Bowlby’s (founder of attachment theory) idea of an internal working model – a mental representation of our relationship with a primary caregiver that becomes a template for future relationships – Brown explains how perception is everything. We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day. “Some of these stories are consciously constructed, but others operate without our knowledge, dictated by scripts handed to us by others when we were young. We can carry around the psychological legacy of our parents for our whole lives, whether bad or good.” (3)
In this insight, Derren Brown is totally on the money. I have actually lost count of the number of times in counselling training essay writing and journalling, and latterly with clients in therapy sessions, I’ve alluded to Philip Larkin’s wonderful poem ‘This Be the Verse’ to illustrate something vital and necessary about the process of exploring clients’ suffering, part of which I’ll quote here:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extras, just for you. (4)
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung made a point on similar lines: “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents,” he famously said. As Brown extrapolates: “Whatever we have taken from them, the founding story of our lives, imposed on us by a mother and father who in turn inherited a faulty script from their own parents, isn’t even ours.” (5)
Brown cites Stoicism – quoting the Roman slave Epictetus, who said: “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters” – as being helpful in realising that there is an enormous gulf between events and what we do with them. And it is here that I would like to turn to Fritz Kunkel, a psychologist contemporary with Jung, whose concept of crisisology has often been the key that unlocks the door to helping clients coming to me for help. Kunkel’s understood that the path to happiness depends on an initial movement downwards: that the way up is the way down. The ancient Greeks, in their profound understanding and depiction of human character, also understood this. Significant twentieth century figures such as the anthropologist Joseph Campbell and eminent psychologist Otto Rank drew on a similar idea of monomyth, which is deeply embedded in religious literature around the world. This is what Campbell described as The Hero’s Journey, a story present in many of the religions of the world – a calling forth of the individual to go on an adventure, a journey of suffering and growth, the summation of which is the Hero coming back changed and transformed, with the elixir of life: for the benefit not only for him/herself and family, but for community itself.
In his most recent book, We Who Wrestle With God, Jungian psychologist Jordan Peterson advances a similar notion, as well as echoing Derren Brown’s conviction that story is everything, raising the context that Brown is alluding to from the purely personal and psychological to the cultural and the spiritual. Peterson explains how the culture war in the West, promulgated by academics and postmodernists have brought forth the idea that life is about hedonistic pleasure and power. “The problem with that,” said Peterson in a recent interview, “is that these stories are self-defeating. We need a different pattern of orientation in the world to enable you to have functional relationships, to give your life meaning.”
We are story-telling creatures – we see the world through a story – and, according to Peterson, we have lost sight of the stories that should orientate us in the world. Peterson brings to mind The Hero’s Journey as well as synthesizes Kunkel in his exposition that: “We’re arranged biologically and spiritually so that we find the deepest meaning in acting out the patterns that are most productive – psychologically, socially, and in the long run. That’s different than happiness. That’s a marker from the deepest recesses of your soul that you’re on a path that’s going to unite you with other people.”
This idea of a journey down (Kunkel called this going to the doghouse), facing your deepest fears, humiliation even, and realising that they are survivable (the mystics would called this a Dark Night of the Soul) ultimately has the potential to free us from the isolating and disconnecting anxiety cycles. This is deeply informed by the scripts, beliefs, and internal working models that Derren Brown, the Stoics, and Bowlby were alluding to. Kunkel believed there are four types of egocentricity – two of which (the Star, the Clinging Vine) are soft; and two (Nero, and the Turtle) harsh – which can be interpreted as the result of typical situations in early childhood. Each ego adaption has a +100 and -100 form (for the Star, this is admiration and ridicule; for Nero, Power and Subjugation; for the Clinging Vine, Protection and Responsibility; for the Turtle, to be left alone and not to be disturbed. Going into the doghouse or the Abyss, as Kunkel also called it, coming face to face with our deepest fears, and finding out they are survivable, is necessary for dismantling the egocentric styles we adopted out of necessity as children, and the beginning of what Kunkel called ‘We experience’.
No one has taken the psychology of Self as far in this direction as Kunkel did. His little known but brilliant concept of the Bent Arrow, drawn for an American psychological journal, profoundly illustrates that true happiness is found through a journey downwards: that is, thesis (the straight line across the arrow, the hand you have been dealt); antithesis (the necessary movement down, plummeting the depths of your pain; and synthesis (the movement upwards, transformation through connecting with your authentic Self). Otto Rank, one of the twentieth century’s most significant psychologists, said much the same thing: “Man is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it but he can live beyond it only through vital experience of his own – in religious terms, through revelation, conversion, or re-birth.” (6)
In a hurting and confusing world, where the illusion of happiness through having and getting more ‘stuff’ has shot its bolt, with ever increasing inequality, financial, climate, systemic insecurity, new stories and other wisdom is needed. In the ashes of failed, disassociated individualism, Kunkel’s psychology illustrates the need to explore the depths and reposition crisis as opportunity. Kunkel, Peterson and Campbell’s Hero’s Journey are profound and prescient reminders that the counter-intuitive, spiritual answer to finding the pathway to happiness is not found in outward things, in dog eat dog competitiveness, positive psychology or goal setting, but in an inward, downward movement where we connect with our suffering and authentic Self. The way up is the way down. And we are all in it together.
Read more of Jonathan Fordham’s articles in Sublime
www.poiematherapy.co.uk IG: @jonathancfordham
Article Photo : by Andras Vas
Citations:
- Derren Brown, Happy, p. xv, Penguin 2016
- Ibid. p. xv
- Ibid, p. 6
- Philip Larkin, ‘This Be the Verse’, High Windows, Faber and Faber 1974
- Derren Brown, Happy, p. 7
- Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology, p.16, Dover Books 1941