Self-portraid made with the non-dominant hand. February 18, 2024.
This may sound like a new agey spiritual nonsense sort of thing, but it’s actually serious. I suppose everyone goes through breakthrough or breakdown periods in life, after which important changes happen both inside and out. During these “lifequakes”, everyone is given an opportunity to see themselves from new perspectives. If they reach a new understanding of themselves, the story that they tell about themselves also changes. As far as I understand, this is kind of supposed to happen anyway. So, for those of us who have been stumbling against these very non-linear “construction sites” in our lives, yey! But you know they weren’t smooth at all, and that doesn’t sound healthy. Or desirable. Some of us never recovered from one of these lifequakes. Some of us just sank into them forever. The more we struggled to make sense of whatever happened, and look at our own narratives to see the flaws, discrepancies, and foreign elements, the worse we did in crossing the disaster zone. I decided to study transitions, with a special interest in how differently wired people navigate them. From everything I read and the ethnographic probes I took, it sounds like the most important tool we have to handle these passages, or transitions, is the ability to create a new narrative. To create a new narrative, we need to understand the one that has just been challenged and shattered, exposing its tension lines and breaking points. To do that, we need to study, to investigate, to conduct research into ourselves, our behaviors, and the patterns in our lives.
That sounded easy to me. After all, isn’t that what I’m supposed to be good at? Research? Classify stuff? Correlate stuff? I started doing just that at every big transition. I am not going to say it didn’t help because any attempt to understand ourselves, to make sense of our behavior, thoughts and feelings, is valid. It’s a step in the right direction, but done with the wrong tools. I only learned they were wrong when I realized what the “job” was: regardless of the intellectual school you follow, it’s about fishing things from an unconscious part of our minds and bringing it to consciousness. Until we start to address this higher level job, all the other jobs are hit or miss, usually miss because those unconscious items make sure it is. The tools I have to investigate reality as a researcher don’t take me far enough into this quest. I needed other tools. That’s one of the reasons we need therapy: it’s about “the right tools for the job”.
The superficial understanding of psychotherapy is “help in difficult times”. It is superficial in the sense that it’s the first approach from people: they seek therapy because they are suffering, and they want help with that. They assume that talking will help, but they don’t know exactly how. Possibly the same process as talking with a friend or a priest, they assume. And they assume right, in part, but it’s just a very tiny part of what psychotherapy is supposed to do. Because to address the kind of suffering people are stuck in means addressing patterns, and trauma, and things that got buried in the unconscious. I lost count of the times I’ve heard “therapy is not for me because I don’t need to talk about my childhood”. It doesn’t matter: your childhood wants to talk to you through trauma. These are the things that emerge during transitions: the things we haven’t dealt with because we don’t even know they are there. They are not in the past: they are very much in the present.
But this article is not about psychotherapy, or psychoanalysis, or analytical psychology. It is about self-discovery - the type we need in the unavoidable non-linear transitions in life - for self re-invention. Or just for living with less turmoil, less pain. Yet, it still involves the concept of the unconscious - the stuff we inexorably deal with all our lives.
Although I’m a big fan of psychology theory erudition, I’m confident that we don’t need to engage with it to do some self-discovery and deal with the creatures of the unconscious because, in what matters, most models converge: first, in that there is an unconscious dimension to our mental activity, and it is not only important but dominant. Everyone agrees with that, don’t worry. Second, in that there is stuff from our experienced lives that gets buried in that dimension, from which it continues to determine our behavior as if it were a conscious element. We act “as if we thought that, and that is how we feel”.
In other words, these things are active, and we will walk around blindly, bumping into walls, barbed wire fences and open fire until we figure out a way to identify how this is happening, and what these obstacles are. Knowing the concept becomes important.
The term “unconscious” was coined in 1813 by Friedrich Schelling, who proposed that the unconscious was the innermost part of the soul, and that it held the answers to the questions of consciousness (Shelling 2019). The concept was then instrumentalized and made central to the theories of the psyche put forward by S. Freud.
“The future will probably attribute far greater importance to psychoanalysis as the science of the unconscious, than as a therapeutic procedure.” said Freud (2012). The therapeutic results of psychoanalysis depend on replacing unconscious mental acts by conscious ones.
In agreement, Jung said: “But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.” (Jung 1963)
Other schools relevant to our quest of figuring out what’s going on also rely on unconscious forces or factors, without necessarily focusing their models on the unconscious or its integration with the self. In transactional analysis, Eric Berne offers an interpretative model of the “(unconscious) games people play” in his seminal book of the same name, in 1964 (Müller 2002, Berne 2011).
These early scholars made the first empirical strides into the study of the unconscious, and much of the tools we have today are based on their investigations.
Freud proposed “free association” as a preferred method to access the contents of the unconscious. The method consists of naming a sequence of words without much deliberation, or in response to a probe from the therapist, “automatically”, one could say. Whatever happens in free association seems to be at play when we do it in writing, alone (and Freud self-experimented with that in his investigation of free association). It also seems to underlie methods derived from art therapy, such as spontaneous collage, or the method devised by the surrealists in the early XXth century, called “automatic drawing”.
How these things unveil hidden stuff from the unconscious dimension is a question being answered at the other end of this intellectual endeavor, the contemporary discoveries in neurology made possible with real time imaging technology.
Methods derived from both transactional analysis and analytical psychology allow us to establish a dialogue with our sub-personalities or parts - the organized psychic arrays within us that seem to have stored traumatic memory in the form of reaction patterns.
Using any of these methods to discover things about ourselves and our story does not constitute therapy - therapy is a relationship process, self-discovery is a private, solitary journey. They are highly compatible, complementary, and non-replaceable.
I tried many methods and protocols. Some I did following instructions to the letter, others I adapted, and I could assess their contribution to my understanding of myself and my issues each week in therapy. I found some of them to be useful, others not so much. I found the most impactful ones in the interface of art and psychology.
As I experimented with each method, I took notes. This particular journey started in September last year (2023). My memory is so ridiculous that I already forgot a lot, and certainly most details. Luckily, I kept those notes in highly detailed “notes books” that contain and describe each experience. I did not keep a journal, a stream of consciousness notebook, a pain sketchbook, an art journal, and any other daily practice repository. Everything I do is in the same notebook. Up to now, I have approximately 150.000 words in them, or a bit more.
Before I forget everything, I will share them here. Use whatever you think will help, leave what does not.
The list of methods and tools for self-discovery that I tested, investigated, and will share in this platform includes mind maps and clusters, free association and word lists, stream of consciousness writing, drawing in general, drawing with the non-dominant hand in art journaling practices, dialoguing with parts or subpersonalities using both hands, and related things like goal setting (spoiler alert: it rarely works), keeping logs, spontaneous drawing, doodling, and collage, and music discoveries. Music contains so much of all this that it constitutes a separate chapter. It contains the soundtrack of our lives, literally, and the soundtrack tells *the* story. It contains probably all the journeys of self-discovery we have ever embarked in, and it contains the key to so many things. It contains the key to the Highway. Not only that, but things like scale practice can be a mindfulness tool, especially for people, like me, who still find it difficult to keep focus while not engaging with something concrete.
I’m not done with any of this. In fact, I've barely started. This is my journey, and I’m documenting it for myself. Why not share?
References
Schelling, F. W. J. . The Ages of the World (1811). SUNY Press, 2019
Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Pantheon Books, New York, 1963.
Freud, Sigmund. 2012. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Wordsworth Classics of World Literature. Herts, UK: Wordsworth Editions
Müller, U. What Eric Berne Meant by “Unconscious”: Aspects of Depth Psychology in Transactional Analysis. Transactional Analysis Journal, 32(2), 107-115, 2002.
Berne, E.. Games people play: The basic handbook of transactional analysis. Tantor eBooks. 2011.