As I have worked with clients over these past five years, it has become clear to me that the foundational determinant of well-being is our relation to the (our) future. This has led me to make a claim that it counterintuitive for a person in my line of work: namely, that the future is everything. It is counterintuitive, because the history of psychotherapy—and this is particularly so for the formative half century of psychotherapy from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries—are so fundamentally focused on clients’ pasts. Listen to Sigmund Freud’s triumphant tone as he describes what would be his therapeutic focus over the entire arc of his career: the past and his ability to know it with causal and scientific precision.
Thus, in this first complete analysis of an hysteria which I had undertaken I attained a process of treatment which I later raised to a method and intentionally used as a process of clearing stratum by stratum the pathogenic psychic material, which we were pleased to compare with the technique of excavating a buried city. At first I let the patient relate what was known to her, paying careful attention wherever a connection remained enigmatical, or where a link in the chain of causation seemed to be lacking. Later, I penetrated into the deeper strata of memory by using for those locations hypnotic investigations or a similar technique.
Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 1901, p. 99 (my emphases)
There are exceptions, but the history of psychotherapeutic practice from its inception to this present day is predicated on this Freudian idea of excavating the past. For Freud and his descendants, the purpose and method and orientation of psychotherapy is to understand, as he writes above, “the chain of causation” that allows analyst (therapist) and analysand (client) to trace the reasons why the analysand struggles in the ways she does. The Freudian project rests on the idea that the archaeological work of analyst and analysand has the capacity to produce insights into the causal mechanisms that produce the analysand’s problems and, by so doing, effect a cure.
I wrote above that in the history of psychotherapy there are exceptions to this archaeological/past orientation that are foundational in the psychodynamic tradition of which Freudian psychoanalysis is the most widely known. The modalities that most conspicuously buck that trend are those that come out of the behaviourist tradition. We are all familiar with this modality whether we are aware or not, because the “B” in CBT stands for behavioural. True behaviourists, like B.F. Skinner, whose experimental work and writing stand as the cornerstone of the tradition, believed that the internal workings of another’s mind was a kind of black box that could not be known. What this means is that because aspects of human existence as fundamental as thoughts and emotions are not primarily observable, they are not an appropriate subject of a scientific investigation. Unlike Freud's scientific aspirations that should never have been taken seriously, Skinner was interested in creating a "real" scientific enterprise. And he did do that... but in so doing he turned humans fully into objects. This is how one critic writing in 1967 put it,
In behaviorism the dictate of natural science is fully adhered to; what the behaviorist explores are entities that are corporeal, in which the perceiver is eliminated. In short the subject matter of behaviorism is one in which self is excluded from the world it investigates. This is perhaps scientific method. But is it psychology? If the self is excluded, if consciousness is labeled meaningless, if all that we experience as "subjective" is not only not explained but rendered out of the field of inquiry, we have no longer a science of the self, no longer a psychology, but a set of theories about human behavior that in principle can be verified only by avoiding the very source of verification, the conscious subject himself.
Jacob Needleman, Being-in-the-World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger, 1967, p. 43 (my emphasis)
Alternatively, what could be known, and on what behaviourists solely focus, is quantifiable behaviour and the stimuli that produce those behaviours. It feels reductive to say, but the whole of classical behaviourism can be boiled down to two single letters: S-R. If it feels overly reductive for me to boil down an entire psychological tradition to two letters, well... it’s how Skinner himself wanted it. S-R stands for stimulus and response. And, as such, unlike their psychodynamic siblings, the behaviourists cared little for the past, because the memories of individuals are locked inside the black box of the brain to which there is no access. Behaviourists are thus locked into an eternal behavioural present.
But what about the future? The history of psychotherapy to this point has been little interested in it. For the psychodynamicists—Freud, Jung, Adler and their descendants—the past is key because of the misguided scientistic belief that the brilliant analyst as archaeologist could pinpoint the precise causal events in a patient’s past that produced whatever the patient came to therapy to solve. Whether it was penetrating questions or penetrating hypnotherapy—as Freud claims above—the psychodynamic therapist’s task is to pierce through the defences—literal penetration—of the patient to demonstrate the true nature of the psychopathology. To the behaviourists, only the present is therapeutically interesting, because the present is the only temporal space available to observe the responses of patients.
While these two traditions dominated the past century and a half of psychotherapeutic theory and practice and in so doing cemented the therapeutic focus on past and present, two unconnected disciplines offer a different take, which I summed up in my introduction, namely that the future is everything.
A quick note on terminology: what am I talking about when I use the phrase, the future? The definite article the is misleading, because the future should probably be written as the futures or perhaps just futures. That is, the future doesn't point to or signify a singular time that has yet to pass but to all possible outcomes that any single person can imagine. This is another reason why the definite article is misleading, because the future represents a different multitude of possibilities for each and every one of us. And it is the breadth of possibility that precisely correlated to the degree to which a person might experience something like anxiety, because anxiety is that condition born of imagination and possibility.
Think of it this way: if the future was singular, there would be no sense of anxiety, because there would be no uncertainty, no questioning about what is to come, and no real decisions that need to be made. But, of course, this is one of the primary reasons clients come to counselling, i.e. difficulty with making singular decisions against the backdrop of a multitude of possible futures that are in conflict. From a metabolic output perspective, a singular future would require much less information processing power. And this ties back to my last couple of posts on anomie—Anomie and depression and Anomie and the cost of the future—which produces an information processing environment that requires an enormous amount of energy that each of us must expend in the to attempt to experience any sense of peace through a modicum of certitude. It is the shortfall of metabolic resources that results from this sort of environment that we call fatigue and insomnia and restlessness and depression and inflammation and all sorts of other physiological/psychological issues to which clients are desperate for solutions.
The two disciplines to which I am referring are neurology and philosophy, and I am going to personify those traditions in two people, both about which I have written before: representing team neurology is Lisa Feldman Barrett and representing team philosophy is Martin Heidegger. Unlike the discussion above around behaviourism and S-R, what I am writing here is actually reductive. There are volumes to say about these disciplines and individuals, but... well... this is a blog post, and I have to find some ways of communicating with some lightness and brevity.
Let’s start with team neurology: one of the most prominent findings produced in the field of neurology over the past quarter century is that the brain’s fundamental temporal orientation is futural. In other words... among your brain’s most important functions is simulating/projecting/predicting possible futures. For real! In her extraordinary book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Feldman Barrett relates to us the most up-to-date research concerning brain function. About S-R she simply writes, “[t]he stimulus-response view, while intuitive, is misguided”. (p. 58)
Why is S-R and the behaviourist program misguided? Feldman Barrett argues that a simply reactive organism—i.e. R for response—would be too metabolically inefficient for survival. She puts it in the following way,
If your brain were merely reactive, it would be too inefficient to keep you alive. You are always being bombarded by sensory input. One human retina transmits as much visual data as a fully loaded computer network connection in every waking moment; now multiply that by every sensory pathway you have. A reactive brain would bog down like your Internet connection does when too many of your neighbors are streaming movies from Netflix. A reactive brain would also be too expensive, metabolically speaking, because it would require more interconnections than it could maintain.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, p. 60
The importance of her point here simply can not be overstated: there are whole parts of our being that necessarily must live in this time we call the future for us to be able to live in the moment-by-moment temporal stream we call the present. This is not an obvious or immediately intuitive way of understanding our relationship with time, especially since we live in a society that keeps on telling us in a variety of ways to live in the present. But as I have written in a past post, we live in the present of our predicted futures.
There is so much more to say about the work of Feldman Barrett and team neurology, but for the time being, let me reduce that work to a single phrase: team neurology is interested in the proximal future. By that I simply mean that the focus of team neurology is the very near future. Team neurology, for example, is interested in the kind of proximal future such as how one’s body needs to predict that standing up will cause what is called orthostatic hypotension. Orthostatic hypotension is a technical way of describing the experience of light headedness after standing up. This happens because one’s blood naturally pools in the lower parts of one’s body when seated, and if one’s body does not predict the right future, it will not compensate by very quickly—and indeed preemptively—raising your blood pressure and reducing the chance that you get lightheaded and faint. This is a perfect example of why S-R doesn’t work, because if your body only had the power to react, there would be many times for many reasons that it wouldn’t react quickly enough and your lightheadedness would lead to fainting. If you were more likely to faint more often... the likelihood of serious head injuries would be much more common than they currently are. But because your body is predictive and not simply responsive or reactive, your blood pressure starts to rise before you stand up. Parts of your brain and your adrenal glands predict that you are going to stand up before you actually do. Without having one foot constantly in the future, life as we know it would be unimaginable. So the next time someone tells you to live in the present, you can tell them that to fully do so would be disastrous.
Team neurology is primarily interested in the proximal or very near future. But, of course, that is only one aspect of the future. It is team philosophy that has something to say about the distal or far future. And the representative I have chosen for team philosophy is everyone’s favourite dour German, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s best known work focuses primarily on the relationship between the experience of personhood and time. It is simply entitled, Being and Time.
Though he never identified himself as such, Heidegger is lumped into the philosophical tradition called existentialism. I myself am a practitioner of therapeutic tradition whose starting point is this philosophical tradition. Existentialism doesn’t have a set definition, but generally refers to, as the name suggests, issues of existence. These include topics and themes such as death, meaning, purpose, time, responsibility, isolation, and choice. You know... all the fun stuff!
If team neurology is focussed on the proximal future—e.g. making sure your adrenal glands properly predict the need to increase your blood pressure prior to standing up and passing out—then team philosophy is focussed on the opposite pole: the event that is definitionally farthest away in one's life, namely... one's death. This is what Heidegger calls one's being-towards-death, and in his work, and in my own way of working with clients, one's orientation to one's death has a direct relationship to the way one lives their day-to-day life. To put it another way, it matters foundationally how you imagine the whole of your possible futures, including your death.
The way forward in therapy is... forward... towards the future. The past is important, but not because that is where all the bad stuff happened, but because the past is where we all learned to conceptualize our possible futures. If you grew up in a household with a parent who, say, had a substance abuse problem, you learned something very particular about the future: you learned that it was extremely unpredictable and often dangerous. If in that household growing up you were hit or neglected, the trauma you suffered was not fundamentally physical but psychic. You may have been injured physically by that parent with a substance abuse problem, but those physical injuries have now healed. You may have been neglected and gone hungry back then, but your stomach is full now. The injury that was done to you in the past was to form in you the necessity of projecting a future for yourself where you might be injured by someone very close to you or that you might not have enough food to eat. It doesn't matter whether that parent still is menacing or even still alive. They instilled in you the possibility that violence or deprivation might be around the corner. And so... you now project futures in which violence and deprivation are always a possibility. And if something is possible, then you must attend to it. Once a possibility has been disclosed, it is near impossible to pretend it hasn't. This is root of the power of trauma: to change the way one projects themselves in the multitude of possibilities. Trauma has the power to change our very sense of what it means to become.
The point of psychotherapy is not, as Freud expressed in 1901, to find the missing causal links in one's past. This was Freud's greatest wish: to turn psychotherapy into a science, and he could only do that if he could demonstrate that like the greatest science of his day he could demonstrate clear causal links. There is considerable philosophical debate about causality full stop—but that discussion isn't for this discussion. The scientists of his day were able to demonstrate verifiably the causal relationships between discrete phenomena. A person's past is in no way something like a discrete phenomenon. Freud's dream for psychotherapy is not realizable. It never has been, and it will never be.
And just like Freud's dream of unearthing the causal past, Skinner's dream—a particularly gross dream to my mind—of treating human beings as operant conditioning mechanisms leaves us stuck in the causal present. Skinner's definition of what it means to be human is so profoundly reductive, that it reduces the complexity of life to two letters: S-R.
Surely, those looking for assistance with their physical, mental, and existential wellbeing deserve something more than failed scientific dreams.
