BOOK
PROFILES

by

Stephen Schoen, Ph.D.

In his beautiful and complex book, PRESENCE OF MIND: LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS OF A WISE PSYCHOTHERAPY, Stephen Schoen has assembled a panel of eloquent and persuasive voices. He has each one speak for himself and skillfully shows how each voice challenges us to celebrate our personal and universal complexity. In his own voice and with examples from his therapeutic work, Schoen integrates their perspectives into a reverence for the human spirit -- encouraging us, like Rilke, "...to return to a love of the questions themselves."

-- Miriam Polster, Ph.D.
Director:  Gestalt Training Center -- San Diego
Author:  "Eve's Daughters: The Forbidden Heroism of Women 

CONTENTS

  1 To Throw Your Heart Over the Fence
  2 William Blake: Right Knowing
  3 Rainer Maria Rilke: When What Is Near You Is Far
  4 Franz Kafka: Holy Fire
  5 Martin Buber: We Together
  6 Lao-Tzu: Things As They Are
  7 Gregory Bateson: Metadiscourse
  8 Jiddu Krishnamurti: The Unconditioned
  9 Contextual Psychotherapy
  10 Toward a New Paradigm of Psychotherapy

CHAPTER 1:  TO THROW YOUR HEART OVER THE FENCE

. . . . Psychotherapy, of whatever branch or school, is inseparably about values; and my concern here is to present the values in it which I find most valuable.

        I shall do so through a series of text commentaries. And the first thing to be said about the texts themselves is that none of them is by a professional therapist. They are from William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Lao-Tzu, Gregory Bateson, and Jiddu Krishnamurti. That is, from poets, story writers, and speculative thinkers.

. . . . Is there a special relevance, for psychotherapy today, to the encompassing values of meaning in life which are expressed by my nonpsychiatric sources? I believe that there is.

. . . . Karen Blixen once observed to a young Danish admirer: "It takes terrible courage to create. A French officer who rode in the concours hippique...told me that one had to jeter le coeur over the fence first, and then it was easy to make the horse follow. Writing is the same."

"To throw the heart over the fence!" A total commitment, in writing -- and first of all, in living -- where courage is reckless and the quality of risk, a little crazy. And then the horse safely follows.

Strange if confident advice, and an essential paradox. Like Goethe's curious maxim: "For a man to do all that is demanded of him, he must regard himself as greater than he is."

CHAPTER 2: WILLIAM BLAKE: RIGHT KNOWING

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
and Eternity in an hour.
                   (Auguries of Innocence)

. . . .Imagination, too, is always an event in the present: the spark which ignites it, and the landscape in which it flares, occur now. In our time, Gestalt therapy in particular has made much of the present moment as the actual arena of life. We do not breathe in the past or the future, and our mental and emotional experiences, too, have their full patterning, their Gestalt, only in the actual event now. . .

. . . . the Proverbs give the moment new scope and power: both in their timeless-present tense and in their concern with the wholeness of each experience, their voice is a Gestalt voice. But with Blake's special inflections and amplifications. One reclaims the self which the past has betrayed or made shallow as, in the moment, one trusts desire, soars with one's own wings, knows the body as God's bounty, opens oneself to another. . . . .Blake has provided us with a cartography of affective states: joy, sorrow, cunning, contempt, enthusiasm, adoration, awe. We see them all as in a landscape. . . .  For desire bound is always desecration. Desire free is endless freedom. In the tone of the piper:

He who bends to himself of Joy
Doth the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the Joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.
             (Gnomic Voices)

CHAPTER 3:  RAINER MARIE RILKE: WHEN WHAT IS NEAR YOU IS FAR

        . . . .Life, Life, strange time
        reaching from contradiction to contradiction,
        going often so badly, so heavily, crawling,
        and then at once, with unspeakably wide-
        spread wings like an angel,
        oh inexplicable....
                 (Sämtliche Werke)

. . . . stay a little longer with Rilke: we appreciate his breadth, as well as his limits, in giving us a world modeled on its possibilities for beauty, a world, so to speak, without prose. And yet that is not nearly to say enough. For his idealism was grounded, too, cultivated by his patience, trust, and confidence in the constantly renewing, increasingly ripening soul.

Silent friend of wide distances, feel
that your breath still adds to space...
Become, in overwhelming night,
the magic power at the crossway of your senses...
Say to the unmoving earth: I flow.
And to the rapid water: I exist.
(Sonnets to Orpheus)

CHAPTER 4: FRANZ KAFKA: HOLY FIRE

. . . . in him, we see a man who couldn't swim, but had the gift of walking on the waves. (Schoen, p.89)

. . . . You do not need to leave the room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. (Kafka: The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections)

. . . . The point deserves our widest regard because, on the other hand, nothing is easier to observe than Kafka's pathology, as he is always himself doing. His journals and his fiction are full of his self-doubt, his feelings of confusion and inadequacy. But from one disorder he is remarkably free. He is nonphobic. He avoids, he disqualifies nothing. He has, instead, the vigor and assurance of a hunter (I get the word from him). "I am on the hunt for constructions," reads a diary entry of November 1913. "I come into the room and find them whitely merging in a corner."

. . . . Yes, in essence I and Thou is simple. Thou is the other, met openly and without design. Love is caring for Thou, and it tempers self-assertion. Without love, the other becomes an It, any use of whom is, in a sense, a misuse.

Has Buber just spun the obvious into an involved dialectic?

Certainly his basic ideas have passed into the stream of our progressive thought. The I-Thou bond is now a commonplace of humanistic psychology: "personal regard," "warm contact," "human equality" -- we know these synonyms for it. And his vision of presence, dialogue, community -- our current words are "immediacy," "responsiveness," "mutuality"; isn't that all clear? Or is it? Have these for us slipped down too easily, like smooth-coated capsules? But there is a fiber in them, and a range and intransigence of meaning, nonclinical, not even secular, which a therapist and client must assimilate slowly.

In a letter to a friend, the Southern writer Flannery O'Connor tells of a brilliant, intimidatingly brilliant, dinner party in 1950 at Mary McCarthy's. After several hours, the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to define....[Mary McCarthy] thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it!"

CHAPTER 6: LAO-TZU -- THINGS AS THEY ARE

. . . . And the questioning springs from what is most vulnerable, unformulable, within us. It accepts inherent contradictions: failure with success, weakness with strength, death with life. And so it returns us to the Tao, but not comfortably. We go with this flow only at a cost, for it asks of us a yielding in which nothing is fixed, in which we become, like it, a mystery.

But in the end there is no other way to see things plain or, without any pressure or constraint, to know ourselves. When we let things be as they are, we shall have become as we are.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
                                 (Tao Te Ching)

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Every desiring, one can see the manifestations.
                                (Tao Te Ching)

CHAPTER 7:  GREGORY BATESON -- METADISCOURSE

. . . . And yet metaphor and sacrament will be cornerstones of his later thought: the search for an inclusive theory of all life that will increase for us the intelligibility of our own living. Not, he was always careful to point out, that human beings aren't uniquely different. But if it is true, in our fullest understanding that "every detail of the universe is seen as proposing a view of the whole," then Nature must, beyond the mere fact of evolution, be consistent and interwoven throughout. There must be (to take a word from his own first field of study) kinship links in the whole system: so that our bonds with the animal world, as displayed on Indian totem poles, are literal, not just symbolic realities; and one can just as well say, of the Catholic sacrament, that God becomes the bread and the wine.

Gregory liked to tell this story: a spinster lady dreams that, while she is lying in her bed at night, a handsome young man, elegantly dressed, climbs through her open window. She sits up as he approaches the bed, clutches the bedclothes around her, and asks hoarsely, "What're you going to do?" Whereupon he pauses, bows to her, and says, "I don't know, Madam. It's your dream."

CHAPTER 8 : JIDDU KRISHNAMURTTI  --  THE UNCONDITIONED

. . . I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect....If an organization be created for this purpose, it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage, and must cripple the individual, and prevent him from growing, from establishing his uniqueness, which lies in his discovery for himself of that absolute, unconditioned Truth....You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free. (Krishnamurti, The Years of Awakening, Mary Luten)

". . . . awareness," notes Krishnamurti, "is like living with a snake in the room; you watch its every movement, you are very, very sensitive to the slightest sound it makes." There is no interval open for fear when you are wholly watching; no place for the demand of answers when you continually "live the question," as we have heard Rilke say. You stay, rather, with the Negative Capability Keats saw in Shakespeare: "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reasons."   Krishnamurti's own dry sentence, to the same point, is: "The moment you have a conclusion...you are finished."

The phrase "contextual therapy" takes its adjective from Bateson's view of what is most relevant in all communication, and lights up a host of concerns important to me. It accommodates both developmental needs, for which therapy provides a context of nurture, and existential meanings, for which it provides a context of values.
       . . . . When I think of "a good life," I think of one richly nourished in its development with love, so that it can use its own resources to go its own way. We have seen how Krishnamurti's life reflects this course. But I think of "a good life" too, apart from its development, as imbued with certain values: integrity, compassion, readiness to persevere with tasks and to challenge limits. Thus, Kafka, in his incessant struggles and rare perceptions. These values in turn inspire continuous self-nurture, in harmony with Blake's faith in desire, Rilke's confidence in inner wholeness, the fulfillment of one's nature, or Taoist Te, and unrestrictive presence with others according to Buber's I-Thou.¹ Contextual therapy, as I am defining it, establishes standards of nurturance and of meaning, to the end that the person takes better care of himself.

. . . . To turn now from the therapeutic insights of our texts to therapy itself: I shall give vignettes from brief therapy, or from pointed moments in longer, ongoing work. . . .

. . . .He came in the next time smiling again, looked at me for a moment, then grew solemn. "I feel I'm avoiding something."

"Are you?"

"I don't know. I thought you thought so."

"No. But you seem to be assuming something devious about yourself."

"Yes. That I'm avoiding the cause...." He paused. "It's just occurring to me," he resumed. "Do you think -- no, it's hardly likely. But -- could I create my own gloom? I always assume that I have to discover the lost key to what makes me gloomy. But is it possible that I just create it each time?"

He was smiling broadly now. "You look much lighter," I said.

"I wonder, though," he went on. "Maybe this is a way of fooling myself. So that I can avoid looking for the key."

"You're a bit stuck, aren't you, with the question `Which one is wearing the wig? Which one is the real Jim?'" "Yes." I went on: "That question too could be part, as you say, of your daily re-creation of gloom." It didn't occur to him that the key which locked him into his gloom -- the prohibitive father whose love he wanted and doubted and compulsively obeyed, at the sacrifice of his own initiative -- that this was one and the same with his daily creation. Nor did I care to point that out now; it was too full of thought, and he used thought against nurturance. I just wanted to turn the key the other way. I added, lightly: "Your daily re-creation is ingenious. It's your perversely neurotic approach."

He smiled again. "That's good. `Perversely neurotic.'"

"Sure. They're your middle names." I went on: "What if you `did' your `days of gloom' another way? You know what I mean? What if you just considered, each day, what you want?"

He kept the banter up. "And what will happen to my being `perversely neurotic?'"

"Nothing very promising. Tell me: How much longer will you be `perversely neurotic' with depression?"

"Three to six months," he said, smiling again.

"And how do you arrive at that?"

"I want to stay within the calendar year. What do you think?"

"Fine," I said. "Naturally, you have to start now. If you're to have `the new way' really take, in so short a time. You may want to see me a bit next year too. To assure yourself: `Have I really done it?'"

. . . how do we connect again to the open acceptance of Thou? The wisdom to which our texts have witnessed points the way: to smile at both the heights and the depths, to see their coexistence as the paradox of our nature and to embrace the paradox; to keep all our conditioning but to wear it lightly; to be without complacence in good fortune, and with courage and resourcefulness in bad; to be compassionate toward all things, our mistakes and silliness too; and to be loyal to the always unfolding moment.

"That alone is true which is fruitful."
                                     (Goethe)

If you mention this web page when ordering Presence of Mind you will receive a 10% discount of the list price of $28.50 plus free shipping via surface for a total savings of  $5.85.

Your total cost is $25.65.

Airmail delivery outside North America is available for an additional $9.00.

Ordering Information

We accept VISA or MasterCard and checks drawn against US or Canadian Banks.

You can E-mail your VISA/MasterCard order to us at info@gestalt.org.

You can fax your VISA/MasterCard order to us at 1-775-599-3950.

You can mail your VISA/MasterCard order or a check drawn against a US or Canadian bank to us at:

The Gestalt Journal Press
P. O. Box 990
Highland NY  12528-0990
USA

---

Return to The Gestalt Therapy Home Page

---