Introduction to My Work

In this beautiful month of May, 2010, I would like to introduce my work somewhat differently, just as I am publishing my eleventh book, Twenty-Four Theorems of the Topology of Captivity and Deliverance. To go straight to the point of what I have come to in the last five years, since Routledge published my Very Brief Psychotherapy – The big question is what is wrong with our patients (and ourselves)? Namely, the diagnosis. What simply to do to turn it around? Namely, the treatment.

Now, I am totally aware that few consider that we all are in the same epidemic, and have but variations of the same illness, which is generated by a single step reiterated. Few think there is a radically simple way out of it, which is generated by a single step, also reiterated.

Isaiah Berlin (Russian Thinkers, 1978) takes up this profound methodological question in his essay about Tolstoy called The Hedgehog and the Fox (original worked published, 1951). It turns around examination of the fragment from Archilochus, The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing (p. 22).

My proposal about the epidemic illness of our time and its reversal sounds very much like the hedgehog who knows, or purports to know one big thing. But as Berlin says about Tolstoy, I would say the same of myself: The hypothesis I wish to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog (p. 24).

How this applies to myself is that I have no faith in generalities, that do not connect to the striking detail. I am a fox for the striking detail, and I take it like a telltale, as would Kutuzov in War and Peace, of the tide or current we are submerged in.

…we are immersed and submerged in a medium that, precisely, to the degree to which we inevitably take it for granted as part of ourselves, we do not and cannot observe as if from the outside…(p. 71).

The insight that reveals the nature and structure of these worlds is not a mere makeshift substitute … it does what no science can do; it distinguishes the real from the sham, the worthwhile from the worthless, what can be done or borne from what cannot be … which cannot be sorted out and described and predicted by any science, because the proportion in them of submerged, uninspectable life is too high … (p. 73).

In other words, neither a fox (pluralist) nor a hedgehog (monist) will catch what needs to be caught: the-striking-detail-in-the-flow-we-are-submerged-in. But what is an example of that?

The simplest detail I can imagine is that of any prey animal caught in the net it cannot get out of. It will be in chronic fight-flight and become quite ill thereby in its hopeless struggle, and gradually become less and less of a being.

If this is the detail I am pointing to as telltale of a dangerous flow we are submerged in, then what is the flow itself? It is the same flow in any corporation, of business, education, medicine, etc. You flood the staff in information (of rules, smart-texts, protocols, etc.), and then you flood them in numbers (of cases, patients, students, etc.). They will be so decentered from what they feel like doing, by what they are required to be doing. They will be in this electronic net which swishes faster and faster. Thus decentered, they will, like any animal, have huge urges for fight or flight. These urges are only likely to get them in worse trouble, by making it evident that they are not team players.

In 2005 in Very Brief Psychotherapy, I described being ill as generated by a single step, reiterated, namely (i), a compulsory yes (to the hierarchy), and (i'), a compensatory phantasy (which gets you in worse trouble). Being well (notice how ill and well differ only by a single vowel, i or e), conversely, is generated by a single step, reiterated, namely (i''), stepping back from being compelled, and another single step, reiterated, namely (i'''), of the balancing between yes and no. Everything depends upon this sensitive dependence upon initial conditions which are recursive (the result of step one is fed into the operator as step two, and so forth). Very Brief Psychotherapy remains the most direct statement of what to do in the fewest pages.

But there has been much I had to do further to recalibrate my instrument. I will indicate what I mean in the next three pages, of three huge developments: the next page being what I put up on my web site as this introduction in 2007 (I stand by every word of it in 2010), the further page being what was discovered in The Great Instrument of Orientation (2008), and the last page what was discovered in Twenty-Four Theorems of the Topology of Captivity and Deliverance (2010). In other words, I am reviewing myself, for you to decide if you want to read this work or not?

Introduction to My Work in 2007.

A market like the web is a market of machines or programs. What is the machine or program I am offering? I call it "the great instrument of orientation." The instrument actually belongs to all of us, for we all have one, one we have ignored, and largely lost. That is, we have largely lost our capacity to see where we are going, which is what orientation is all about. Animal life began when the tunicate or sea squirt made the change from sessile plant to moving larva and got itself a neural network to find its way. Interestingly enough, the sea squirt dissolves its brain when it reattaches in the sessile form.

In place of orientation, we have what Allen Tate called "the most dangerous program in western history," (from "Three types of poetry," in Essays of Four Decades), or isolated will, trying to do the work of the imagination. By isolated will, Tate means a will to bring about a known result, like extraction of oil from a property. It is isolated, and isolating, because its purpose is carried out independently of all other considerations for that property. In other words, it ignores the whole situation. America has led the world in the design of such machines, or programs. We are a veritable collection of techniques, materials, and diversions. We have a vast set of them for each business, or profession, or administration, proliferating daily, and available on http://www.

What is the danger? The danger is the one in every person I meet, patient, neighbor, or colleague – each becomes a shapeless jumble of one hundred loose ends, whose steward he or she is turned into – each becomes his or her own list. The center is lost, and the means run away with us.

Thoreau warned of this 150 years ago in Walden, and Shakespeare 400 years ago in his tragic equation of Puritan will destroying the Goddess of Complete Being (Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Ted Hughes, esp. pp. 157-162). Our idealism has turned into a mechanical idealism, of the head running things (Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence).

Life by the list brings about a way of earning $, as an operator of one of these machines or programs, at the expense of everything else. I have recently had two dreams about our situation, as I complete my outline of my tenth book, The Great Instrument of Orientation.

The first dream I call "The Button." I dream I am a neurosurgeon trying to perfect an operation for the button in the center of the brain. It is about the size of a button on a shirt, but with a horizontal slot in it, rather than the usual four holes. The trouble with this button is that I can bring the left end of the slot into focus, but this dims the right end of the slot, and vice versa. I find it extremely frustrating, and puzzling, but wake up knowing I have to find a way to do it, and I will do it, by working on it every day until I get the operation right. Of course, it is a metaphor of operating on what is wrong with all of us, in which our exterior seeing dims our interior, or our interior seeing dims our exterior.

This dream was followed by a second dream a week later which I call "The Goddess of Complete Being." I dream she is up on a rooftop dressed all in white, but she comes down from the roof, and is divided between a white upper body, and a dark lower body. Dressed all in white alludes to the abstraction of thought that becomes typical of us, when physical details go unnoticed. William James wrote that "…people with this mind-set have minds that resemble white night-gowns," (p. 71), A Little Book of the Human Shadow, p. 71, Robert Bly). The dark lower half of the body refers to a poem by Rilke, taken up by John Dominic Crossan in The Dark Interval.

So, the great instrument of orientation is a counter-machine for giving us back our own center, which is "The Button," and "The Goddess of Complete Being" who is equally white and dark. The five powers of this instrument are discussed in the Door County Program for 2007 at the conclusion of this website, and all the preparation for this instrument in nine previous books is amply available by clicking on to selected chapters.

The Great Instrument of Orientation (2008).

This book is a direct reply to the problems in Introduction to My Work in 2007. If there is a continuous danger of the exterior light dimming the interior light, and vice versa, on the horizontal axis, and if there is a continuous danger of the monistic hedgehog dimming the pluralistic fox on the vertical axis, and vice versa, then the only place to see the whole phase space is in the equipoise between all the forces, which I call the transitional field.

In this transitional field, everything can be taken in at once. In this field of play, one gets a full view of the exterior field, of the interior field, and can slide freely up and down the scales, from the infinitesimal to the cosmic. I call it in this book the full musical score.

In other words, the fundamental problem for any animal is orientation or positioning in the field it inhabits: to arrange a match between its needs and its habitat and open to it; to detect a mismatch and close to it. An animal that cannot open and close in the right places is disoriented, and soon to be ill, and further to become less and less.

Twenty-Four Theorems of the Topology of Captivity and Deliverance (2010).

Why is delivering oneself from capture so unstable in the last five thousand years of empire? Northrop Frye (The Great Code, The Bible and Literature, 1983) calls the pattern the U-plot:

The high points of deliverance, as in the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, are always followed by the Israelites being dragged into captivity once again by the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Romans, etc.

Not only is this the only subject of Western literature, but also the only problem of all of us in daily life, and the only subject of biology and physics, according to Rene Thom (Morphology and Morphogenesis, 1972) and Ilya Prigogine (The End of Certainty, 1997). It works from the largest to the smallest scales.

I had a dream of the tersest sort as I contemplated this situation we are all in, in every breath. I dreamt that I could park my car either on the street, or a step away in a private parking lot:

This refers to a workshop I will do this fall for the Minnesota Psychiatric Society: the bed and breakfast I am arranging for my wife and myself asserts in its website that parking is available on the public street. My dream topology reverses their edict by putting our car in a private domain. Why?

Because the entire point of my teaching to them is that public, street space decenters all of us in a flood of information and a flood of numbers of cases. Decentered, we are animals in an electronic night, who will be in continuous fight-flight which makes our patients and us ill.

Whereas, in a private, centered, transitional field, we are like Bateson's dolphins (Steps Towards An Ecology of Mind, 1972) which are untrained from the usual trick, and make an effortless display of fresh movements. I did it myself on the tennis court the previous day and today. By going into the uncertainty about every play, or sentence, or exchange in my life, I await whatever comes back. In tennis, it is called the split-step, where you step forward one little step with the left foot, and land on your two feet equally, ready for whatever comes back.

A well-demarcated transitional field like a tennis court or a soccer field or a trout stream allows this beautiful free play. As Bateson would say, it is set apart by unmistakable context markers. The fundamental problem of orientation is crossing back from this private domain of being centered in play and the public domain where nearly everyone you run into is decentered themselves and decentering of you!

The crucial move is not to be dragged into their decenteredness, but to fold their rhythm into your transitional, centered field. You do this by exquisite attention to how you enter into relation with them: one step towards, ready for one step back; or one half of the time to enter into their world, and one half of the time to get out of it! You can smile to yourself, as they try to complicate your exit! If you allow any crowding or rushing of yourself, you will notice a slight fever!