Meaning?

Meaning?               By Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
May 2010

     I went into a bookshop the other day and a display consisting of discounted tarot cards caught my eye. I am rather fond of beautiful objects and these were definitely attractive. Just as I was about to pick a deck up, a man I didn’t know asked me whether I believed in these things. I replied I don’t believe in the cards per se, but am intrigued by the stories they tell and the meanings I make of them. I don’t believe in newspapers or telephone directories or street signs, for that matter. All these are merely means of communication.

      The man then asked me was it true that people commit suicide after using tarot cards. I replied, people who try to commit suicide are just as likely to do so after assuming a voice on the radio is telling them this is what they must do; in other words it is the psychosis that makes the difference, not what the person blames for suggesting they act in this way. A person who hears voices coming from a toaster cannot convince me that toasters are intrinsically evil.

      The fellow understood my drift, for he then spoke about the Tom Hanks movie, The Castaway. Hanks portrays a fictional FedEx employee, Chuck, who is stranded alone on a deserted island after the plane he was in crashes over the South Pacific. He manages to survive using remnants of the plane’s cargo. He finds a volleyball  on which he marks a face, gives it the name Wilson and talks to as a friend. Though this is “crazy” stuff to those of us thinking about it now, the making meaning by making “alive” an inanimate object kept Chuck sane and allowed him eventually to get off the island. The making of meaning is essential for human life, but the medium for it is only a stimulus to this process.

       The capacity to make not only sense of something, but to allow this to enliven and empower us is essential for human life itself. Viktor Frankl, a remarkable Jewish psychiatrist who has deeply influenced me, developed a branch of psychotherapy known as logotherapy in response to his experiences in Nazi death camps. There he noticed that those who used the experience of being there as an opportunity for self growth as well as discovering how to be present for others (see Man’s Search for Meaning), lived, while those who found it all meaningless and closed their eyes and lived in the past, weakened and died. The attitude of nihilism is already a death and a disconnection from life.

        We are much more than our biology, social and psychological conditions, heredity and upbringing. We are selves in relation to other selves and in relation to our time and place and the meanings we make are carried in some form across generations, yet all these enable us to interpret something. Subject to time, space and place, and coming from our particular psychological and bodily state (alert, tired, moody, psychotic, grief stricken, buoyant, sick, hunger, satiation, etc), as well as our belief systems, family conditioning, education, and how influenced we are by our peers also shapes how meaning is made. Every meaning we attach to something is in a process of becoming something more and is always open to interpretation.  Interpretations that are especially nurturing and full of meaning for us personally inspire choice-full behaviour. Inspired by the meaning we have made about something we can then choose to live in creative and empowering ways. 

      This is one very important purpose of psychotherapy and counselling. Such therapy opens up, client and therapist together, innovative, soul consoling, self-nurturing ways of understanding present circumstances and enables the client to move in directions that really matter to him/her.

      The symbols represented in the tarot deck allow for creative meaning making and are neither intrinsically evil nor good (whatever these terms mean), nor can be blamed as an inspiration to suicide – despite what some religious groups claim. The outright rejection of tarot cards on the grounds of hokus pokus, also, misses the point. The cards are a stimulus to self-examination and awareness of inner processes. As such a trigger, the cards are very useful as much as any book that touches, challengers, and inspires us. And, of course, they are often very beautiful items to look at.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell