spirit and psychotherapy

Notes for a forthcoming workshop on psychotherapy and the spirit.

Soul, Spirit, and the Moral Exhortation to Joy

Soul and spirit are not infrequently conflated. Perhaps this happens most often when the assumption has been made that "soul" and "spirit" gain their meanings by referring to things (other than human beings). It's hard then to think of two different beings that the two different words signify. But often we might do better to consider "soul" and "spirit" to enjoy their meaning by way of referring not to entities but to sets of qualities. ... And yet we do anyway know that soul and spirit, these two sets of qualities, are very often intimately related in our lives - this is why St Paul talks of "the word of God [being] sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit...". Even so, Mary distinguishes them in her song: “My soul [ψυχή] glorifies the Lord, and my spirit [πνεῦμά] rejoices in God my Saviour".

I mention this because in what follows I want to explore both the distinction of soul and spirit, and their essential overlap, in psychotherapeutic practice. (I confess that I just don't have a clear idea yet of what's meant by another of this workshop's themes - "the transcendent" - so will leave it aside for now.) My exploration is not today conducted so much as to satisfy abstract theoretical interests, but because I think there's a blindspot in therapeutic theory and practice. I'll own it: there's been a blindspot in my own. One having to do with the relation of morale to morals, one concerning our valid duty to be cheerful and yet the baleful character of various exhortations to joy, one concerning too the boons to morale of such dignity as reflects a moral life. As with various of the difficulties in contemporary therapeutic theory and practice the trouble stems, I now think, from the attempt to liberate spirit from soul... You want vitality without virtue? ... Well, good luck with that!

But first let's bring the meaning of "soul" and "spirit" into view by considering their use in non-therapeutic contexts. 

Soul vs Spirit

First: soul. So yes, sometimes "soul" means something like "human being": "100 souls went down with the ship"; "he was the only soul on the lonely hillside"; "Those who accepted his message were baptised, and about 3000 souls were added to their number that day" (Acts 2:41). But notice, bringing a whole person under the "soul" description is considering her under a distinctive aspect - as a unique mortal living her life virtuously or otherwise; sometimes suffering or experiencing joy, sorrow, conscience, empathic concern, self-consciousness; able or struggling to love; hoping or troubled, despairing; able to be kind or cruel, courageous or pusillanimous, introverted or extroverted; and sometimes trying, and sometimes failing, to do her best. 

We see what we have in mind when thinking on the state of someone's soul by considering the idioms with which we articulate our soul concerns. Looking into those windows to the soul which are someone's eyes, or considering their soulful glance, we might see a deep pensive sadness or cynical despair, hopeful yet fraught expectation, a preoccupied yearning, or an open joyous lovingness. (We don't however see a whole range of ordinary emotion - fear, amusement, agitation, etc. That's not soul-talk.) Someone baring her soul to us tells us not of everyday pleasures and annoyances but of what she’s most ashamed about, what in her heart she allows herself to long for but fears to be ever unavailable, how she struggles to maintain her hope, and so on. When we hear her soul-stirring words, we typically have aroused in us such emotion as indexes our honest encounter with what in life is most poignant, humanly significant, and of value. Our soul is both what's innermost and what's most resonant, hence the sound post of the violin is called its soul. We see this meaning too in our talk of: the gaze that pierced her very soul; the music stirred his very soul; ‘uncontrolled feelings of jealousy can ... blacken the very soul’; ‘we dug deep to examine the very soul of our organisation and acknowledge our mistakes.’ You can find rest or repose for your soul in the comfortable words of Jesus or in the prayer of Eternal Rest ('may their souls, and all the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace'). An unquiet soul is burdened by a bad conscience, by lonesomeness, by despair. Repentance, confession and a loving connection with his Maker enabled the hymnodist and philanthropist Horatio Spafford, whose property was lost, whose four children were drowned, to feel confident enough to still say When peace like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say; It is well, it is well, with my soul. Soul talk is often concerned with moral wretchedness: ‘confession is good for the soul’, so that 'by confessing his crime he lost his liberty but regained his soul’. 'Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed’. (If we were asked to say whether, at this point in the communion rite, we are praying for our guilt, our shame, our hopelessness, or our loneliness to be healed, I think we shouldn’t want to choose.) We are interested in feelings here, but in more than that: in our moral status which status may or may not be inwardly felt. 'Segregation', says Martin Luther King, 'substitutes an 'I-It' relationship for the 'I-Thou' relationship... It scars the soul and degrades the personality.' Aquinas's 'stain on the soul' concerns our sin. 

Essential to soul, though, are some qualities that also pertain to spirit. Certain kinds of labour, abuse, or disappointment can be soul-destroying. It's our hope, motivation, and joy that leave us then: ‘The daily rat race is soul-destroying: you soon give up all aspirations and just try to survive the boredom.’ Souls may also be given away, signed away, or sold to the Devil. ‘Now he’s working 7 days a week in the factory for this tyrannical boss, he can't call his soul his own.’ A Faustian bargain is today understood as one in which one sells one's soul for material gain. (Judas Iscariot also 'sells out', betraying Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.) Mark (8:36; see also Matthew 16:26; Luke 9:24-5) records Jesus saying 'For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?' Souls may be lost in two ways: either the lost soul is morally wretched, seemingly beyond retrieval (it takes amazing grace to save such a wretch as is lost thus). Or it’s lacking in hope: lonely, without self-belief, and without sufficient self-understanding, self-possession or wisdom to take stock of and make changes to a life which isn’t soul-nourishing.

To summarise so far, soul-speak has to do with the interpenetration of hope, love, and conscience in our lives. Spirit, however, has rather more to do with our energy, animation, liveliness, mood, pluck, quickenedness, vim and courage. Thus a spirited individual is one who's full of vim, enthusiasm, pluck, energy and courage. Our spirits can be high or low; we may have a light or heavy spirit. Spirits can be lifted or dampened. Spirits here has everything to do with mood. You can be in good spirits too. Sometimes however spirit equates to temperament: he was mean spirited; or: "that's the spirit!". This use generalises across from people to societal situations (the spirit of the Blitz, Dunkirk, the age, the times). We see something similar with: she had a fighting spirit. He was a free spirit filled with the spirit of adventure; she was a kindred spirit. At other times spirit particularly has to do with courage and perseverance: 'the indomitable human spirit that's impossible to subdue or defeat'. Both soul and spirit get contrasted with body, either the literal body or the 'flesh' of the Christians (i.e. our sinful desires). 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak' (Matthew 26:41) (Russian translation: 'the vodka is excellent but the meat is poor'); "sadly I can't be there in person, but I'll be with you in spirit". Spirit qua real meaning, purpose, value gets contrasted with the written word, rules, and conventions: the spirit versus the letter of the law. Or: "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." (2 Corinthians 3:6). This takes us to the holy spirit, the nine fruits of which are "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22). The seven gifts of the spirit, by the way, are: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. Its symbols include dove, fire, water and light. ... And our animal spirits are akin to our 'nerve' or élan vital (Bergson). 

We can understand a little more about spirit by thinking on what it is to lose it. I'll just briefly consider Levi's and Frankl's holocaust memoirs. In If This is a Man Levi describes the difference between the 'drowned' and the 'saved'. The latter, perhaps except for a few who are made of the stuff of martyrs and saints, are those who (sell their souls and) collaborate with the Nazis and/or who compromise and fight and cheat their way to self-preservation. The former - Levi also calls them Muselmänner (Muslims!) - fairly soon go under:

All the musselmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea. On their entry into the camp ... they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired t understand.

In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl agrees that 'only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back... we know: the best of us did not return.' Even so, his is a more optimistic tract - perhaps because he wrote of the conditions in slightly less brutal concentration camps than Auschwitz: 'Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.' He also wrote that 'the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influences.' What kept a man's spirits alive was hope. Not knowing how long his imprisonment would be was a major blow to one's spirits, resulting in a 'provisional existence of unknown limit'. The death rate of prisoners in the week between Christmas 1944 and New Year's dad 1945 was particularly high. Frankl reports the belief of a concentration camp doctor who felt this was due to the prisoners having 'lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died.' Those who did hold onto hope but then, on release from captivity, found they had no family to go back to - their plight was very desperate indeed.

 
Psychotherapy

Now the psychotherapist is, at least in name, the therapist of psyche and not of pneuma. And there are aspects of therapeutic work that bear this out: the therapist's concern with integration - inner wholeness - for example, is a soul rather than a spirit concern. And yet to the extent that our hope is to restore the spirits of the dispirited, we might consider ourselves pneumatologists. So too, to the extent that we hope to restore the courage of the discouraged through encouraging them, are we concerned with matters of spirit. (By the way, if you can't find a way to encourage that doesn't affect your neutrality - your not impinging your will on your patient - then I suggest rethinking your clinical practice!) But what interests me here is the way in which soul and spirit are anyway interpenetrating. An example: hope is a function of the soul, whilst courage is of the spirit. But in therapeutic practice we do well to consider these together - because it takes courage to hope, and hope - all being well - gives rise to courage. (Frankl: 'When we spoke about attempts to give a man in camp mental courage, we said that he had to be shown something to look forward to in the future.')

I think we all intuitively understand this dynamic, but perhaps it's worth making it clear. So the low-hanging psychological fruit that's most tempting for a certain kind of disaffected teenager is cynicism. If I'm cynical and relentlessly ironic I can remain uncommitted, uninvolved, aloof, self-contained. Nothing much is at stake for me; I don't invest anything. I don't pin my colours to any mast. I don't risk my hopes being dashed because I've never pinned them on anything to start with. I don't populate the future with potential meaning. And so too I don't allow myself to love openly. Love, after all, brings with it the hope of being welcomed and reciprocated; instead I remain closed off, invulnerable. I don't share my warmth, my hope for closeness; I don't allow myself to be known. I cultivate a merely parasitic form of identity; what I am is: not one of those there dupes. To move beyond cynicism takes courage because, now that I'm investing, now I can be hurt - and that is naturally a frightening prospect.

Courage, note, is a virtue. The dictionary may tell us that courage is the ability to control your fear in difficult situations. But the serial killer who steels himself before he goes out killing is not really courageous. (It may however take real courage for him to turn himself in.) He may be properly said to be in high spirits when out on one of his killing sprees - but his soul is still black. 

That was an extreme example of how spirit and soul can go their separate ways. But what's of far more interest I think is how they nourish one another. There are two versions of this that I want to consider. One is passive; its articulation has largely been the preserve of the Christian religion. The other is active, and has a wider set of sources. I'll begin with the latter.

One of the ways we can become more buoyant is through acting in accord with those regulative ideals we call "virtues". The relevant link here, between soul and spirit, is dignity. Imagine: I've not really heard of courage, probity, respect, forgiveness, hopefulness, apologising, etc. My upbringing has been corrupt; these virtues haven't been instilled in me. The cost to me is that I'm then also deprived of the opportunity of taking a vivifying, heartening, pride in living in accord with the virtues. Such pride - as when one holds one's head up high without one's nose being in the air - is what's referred to with a central use of "dignity". It installs an internal locus of evaluation: I can now take my own pride in, say, declining the invitation by peers to engage in destructive behaviour, rather than being utterly dependent on their valuing of me. I can feel good that I've been courageous. Of course it all helps build my self-esteem if another person - my father maybe, at first - also praises me for my courage or probity. But the dignified individual, who has installed this sense of self-valuing through knowing that they've acted in a virtuous manner, is far less reliant on such external reinforcements.

The quieter route by which morals influence morale is the path of love. Yes, I can, if I'm able to take courage in my engagements with a troubling world, now be proud of my acts. But when it's pursued alone such an auto-encouraging route risks becoming as it were too Greek, too Nietzschean. It's all very well for those blessed with good constitutions, for the psychologically well, the strong, the fortunate. But many of us are not so blessed with fortitude. We're anxious, struggling, perhaps sometimes able to get through the day but not so much able to face our fears. (I owe this point to Paul Standish.) Maybe we're depressed. Maybe we're far more likely, if we so much as invoke the framework of shame and pride, to be overwhelmed by self-loathing at what we don't do than pride at what we do do. But thankfully there's another path to spirit's recovery. This involves openness to love. (Which, it's worth noting, still takes courage.) Receptivity to grace. Our spirits now are buoyed from without - by the Holy Spirit perhaps. Or by the love of a friend or a friendly stranger.

Now it's not only courage, but hope, that's a virtue. I think that can seem puzzling to some. They might think: aren't hope and hopelessness just states of mind? Or, even if there is something vicious about adopting a gloomy pessimism, isn't the kind of hopelessness we meet with in the clinic of a different non-moral order? Can it really be right, when we're trying to bolster the spirit, to appeal to the soul? Won't this inevitably just be dispiriting? The domitability [subduability] of the human spirit: can this really be a moral concern? Can there really be a duty to be cheerful - or at least to aim at cheerfulness? We are just all-too familiar, are we not, with the depleting effects of putting on a cheery face, a false front that further alienates us from what might be sources of succour. 

Well, I suggest that there can be a place for calls to hope. Especially when the patient has been helped to finally understand their depressive defences against anxiety - at this point it's no longer an extra-moral option to continue to engage, to not notice and retract, the defence. For now we see that we have some existential room to disengage cynicism, to steer our attention to the good, to dare to hope. Relatedly there comes a time when we do well to stop nursing our wounds or grievances. We know what it is to accept, for example, that life is a little harder than we thought it would be and harder than we thought it ought to be. Acceptance as the route to spirit's restoration is one of the key theme here. Acceptance of the world's independence of my will; acceptance of the fact that fairness is a limited and limiting concept with which to organise my thought; acceptance that I'll sometimes need to 'buck up' or 'pull myself together' or 'pull my head out of my arse' - and in coming to this acceptance now release the energy - the spirit - to tackle life's challenges.

Now we have, I've been suggesting, a limited moral 'duty' to aim (not only at acceptance but also directly at) cheerfulness. The James-Lange theory of emotion - if you'll forgive a mini detour - is a peculiar thing, in part because it takes itself to reverse an allegedly ordinary understanding of happiness's relation to its physiology which understanding is in truth far from ordinary. On the allegedly ordinary understanding, happiness the emotion precipitates its physiological concomitants; on the 'enlightened' reverse theory, the warmth and smile and relaxation we feel in happiness cause the emotion. Now neither causal notion is I think something we should accept (although if we turned to material rather than efficient causes we might perhaps keep the idea of the physiology as 'cause') - and ultimately we should reject the entire underlying 'what is happiness?' question (and instead restrict ourselves to answering what is essentially true of she who's happy). But what the theory usefully promotes is the idea that adopting the 'posture' as it were of happiness is indeed a way to evoke it. Just as adopting the posture of prayer invokes humility, or clenched fists promote anger. Open hands warm heart. 'Be of good cheer' is a valuable exhortation, said at the right moment, in the right way. So too 'steel yourself', 'lively up yourself' (as Bob Marley exhorts), 'Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you' (as Paul exhorts). Spirit may, in a limited domain, be kindled by will. I think we all know this.

Now it might plausibly be suggested that the psychotherapy patient is not going to be someone who can be helped in this way. That they will have already tried all this before they arrive at the therapist's door. And I'm sure we can think of many cases in which that's just right, cases in which attempts at self-management result in little more than repression, in a false self system,  in demoralisation - in short, in a blow to the spirit. And yet my clinical experience - and how about yours? - is increasingly that this simply isn't true for many patients. That they not infrequently lack the ordinary ways to manage fear through self-steeling. That they lack a readily available notion of "dignity" to make use of as a regulative ideal in managing life's anxieties. That accordingly they are simply unaware of the value of forgiveness, of courage, of charity, of temperance, and of cultivating an ordinarily positive outlook, for the happy life. In short, and in conclusion: that they are unaware that the restoration of the spirit depends on the restoration of the soul. And so they are deprived of access here to one of the more powerful motivators of human action, namely their consciences, as a resource to mobilise inner change. So that this, then, is what we should work to help them with.