Meaning

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.

Epoché by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

June 2018

     I have a friend who when confronted by a single sight of something fabricates a whole story around it, filling in details that seemingly come out of nowhere. For example, he and I were driving together through the forest around here and came upon a woman hitchhiking at a really awkward corner where there was no way we could pick her up, so we kept on going. A few minutes later my friend came up with a whole story about this woman where she was escaping from a horrible marriage where the man beat her. I said, we don’t know that, her car might’ve broken down, or she might’ve hitchhiked there and now was wanting to leave, or maybe prefers to hitchhike, or any other unknown reason.

     Making up stories is less about doing it for the fun as attempts to see things according to a pre-existing idea, experience, or hypothesis about human situations in ways that do not consider alternative possibilities. This is known as cognitive bias, or confirmation bias. The single idea is elaborated on in order to see it in recognizable ways.  My friend concocted his story to fit something familiar to himself.

     I need to add some background here. My friend was visiting a relative who also lives here whose marriage had broken down. He had also spoken to me of the imminent divorce of a young Perth friend of his (a young woman he helped rear). So, marriage breakdowns were very much on his mind. The random encounter of a woman on the side of a forest road was made to fit a pattern and situation that was preoccupying him.

     This is fairly common tendency that is quite useful when trying to make sense of the behaviour of other people when we don’t know the full story as it allows for a seeding of empathy for others in the community and it is a time saving exercise. It is one, however, that is open to misuse. When we construct a story around a single observed fact about a behaviour, we risk stereotyping others with our own bias.

      The psychotherapist has to deliberately abandon cognitive biases. For a therapist to run with a preconceived idea is to not listen to what is actually being presented. Indeed, we are trained to put aside our preconceptions, to suspend our beliefs about how the world and its inhabitants “should” be according to our own worldview, so as to hear how the other person actually operates in the world. This is what we call epoché. If we, in this profession, don’t suspend our judgement, we are no good to anybody.

     Effective therapy begins with the close hearing of the texture and resonance of voice, the words chosen, whole body demeanour, the capacity for listening, their willingness to enter the therapeutic conversation, the heaviness or lightness of being (too heavy, too light), avoidance, confrontation, repeated accounts, and so on. We need a sensitivity to be present with the person with us, and a not too ready desire for resolution. We have to hold back solutions, because if we go in with what we consider good solutions without having actually understood where the person is coming from, then we have effectively lost them. We also need to be able to say we don’t know sometimes and even to enter the dark place of ignorance and sit with it to see what emerges.

     There is something of the scientist in the epoché, but only in the sense that here practiced dispassionate detachment is actually being very present, caring, and listening deeply to the other person. What must be realized though that to achieve it, we have to know our own mind, with its predilections, biases, assumptions and this means that to practice psychotherapy we should (at least as I and many others see it) have experience of our own therapy and also engage in regular supervision. We need a clarity of vision and self awareness to be good at what we do and this practice of bringing awareness to our own lives needs to be continued throughout our whole working life.

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