Human Agency as Therapy

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Hi there,

Welcome back to Pineapple Mindset, the humanist psychology newsletter for a world in which ‘can you hear me?’ has replaced ‘hello’ as the universal human greeting.

I missed an edition of this letter a fortnight ago, which is not something I planned. Unfortunately, my mental health took a turn for the worse, and as much as I’d like to get these out on a regular fortnightly basis, I’d also like to not push myself beyond my capacity. Best to practice what I preach.

As a result of having two extra weeks to work on material however, I ended up writing enough content for two newsletters. So enjoy the below, and look forward to its follow-up tomorrow.

Human Agency as Therapy

I thought over these next few newsletters I’d touch on the concept of human agency. The idea that we get to direct our own fate and how we approach the world to me is not only hugely compelling, but positively therapeutic. While well-known as the basis of existential thought, it’s not so commonly pursued through a therapeutic lens, with the notable exceptions of Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT), which has become increasingly popular, and existential psychology.

The latter is most commonly associated with Viktor Frankl, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor most famous for his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning and his school of logotherapy, which I’ll have a lot more to say over the coming newsletters. I’m going to keep coming back to Viktor Frankl, so if you’re unfamiliar with his work, I don’t think I can do anywhere near as good of a job as explaining his philosophy and psychology as this YouTube video. I only became familiar with his work last year, but it provided the kind of psychological framework that I had been seeking for years.

It’s a shame that psychology doesn’t often centre human freedom, because while as a discipline it has a lot to say about the brain, the body and the mind, psychology actually doesn’t always say so much about what it’s actually like to be a human being and actually live in the world. We segment off the mental aspect of our lives as if it’s an internal organ – eat more fish to improve your heart health, apply a cleansing mask to improve your facial skin – as opposed to literally the structuring basis of our lives. We treat our errant thoughts – you’re not ugly like you think you are, people aren’t always judging you when you walk into a room – but not the actual human which thinks them.

While in a physical sense we might literally be bodies before we are minds, powered by chemical impulses in our brains, in our lived experience we’re the very opposite. Our mind is everpresent, and our body is often a lagging indicator. Somebody can live a wonderful and meaningful life with a severely damaged body. It is hard to say the same of somebody who has a severely damaged mind.

So when we speak about living in the world, we inevitably have to speak about human agency, as one can only coast for so long before being presented with dilemmas and conflict. At some level, we need to encounter the anxiety of choices, of making decisions. How do we act? How do we know we’re making the right decision? How do we know if anything we do even matters?

Even if we do our best to not get caught up in such difficulties, this is itself is a choice to minimise conflict at any cost. Existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously noted that we cannot escape our existential predicament, as even denying our own freedom is itself making the free choice to act in a cowardly or self-preserving manner.

“Man is condemned to be free.”

Many of us recognise this when we reflect back on previous moments on our lives and acknowledge where we could’ve done better – in some cases, much better. It wasn’t that our actions weren’t understandable necessarily, but that in hindsight they weren’t actions which reflected our values or the kind of person we consider ourselves to be. The discomfort, and hopefully growth, comes from the recognition that this incongruence can actually be resolved by acting better in the future. The forces that gap are forgiveness – from others, and of ourselves – and redemption – the striving to do better. Without freedom in our actions, life is just a boring morality play.

There is great hope in being condemned then. While existentialism often takes the reputation of being a doom-and-gloom philosophy – something its proprietors did much to exacerbate with book titles like Nausea – it’s fundamentally a philosophy of liberation, because its key lesson is that despite all the bullshit we tell ourselves, we’re actually not chained to the past. We’re fundamentally free to do anything we want, today. And when applied to psychology, this is transformative.

A psychology that centres human agency is particularly important when it comes to processing traumatic incidents in our lives. As a therapist once said to me, the term ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ is in some sense a misnomer, as for those living with trauma (and I really can attest to this), there’s very little ‘post’ about it, as the trauma is still an ongoing lived experience. It’s viscerally felt within the body and mind, and it’s difficult to separate one’s self from the overwhelming feeling that everything is going wrong, that their safety has been compromised and they’re all exposed.

PTSD is such a difficult mental illness to live with, because while you appear fine, at any point your entire day or week could be upended because something rhymes with the trauma that you’ve experienced. It’s not as cinematic or comedic as Principal Skinner’s Vietnam flashbacks – instead it’s so vague and tangential that you have to explain to somebody why the word ‘dinner table’ in fact reminded you of domestic violence.

In fact it’s this very debilitating randomness that is one of PTSD’s most potent barbs. To feel constantly subject to random words, impulses, tones of voice, etc., makes you highly unreliable both to yourself and to others. The base-level reliability and decorum that paid employment requires is difficult to guarantee when you have PTSD, let alone higher-level functions like social engagements or dating. And even if you make it through survival mode, there’s the depressing thought that life doesn’t seem worth very much if it takes every effort just to make it through the mediocrity of work and chores. Shouldn’t life be more than surviving for more than a day?

It’s in this context that I sometimes think the emphasis on Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) can be potentially misleading. I recall reading a newsletter by the pop-psychologist Mark Manson, a writer even less informed than myself, where he contrasted PTSD with PTG, arguing that we should not buy into limiting beliefs about the former and instead embrace growth from trauma.

Now, while I of course support people growing from trauma instead of falling victim to the logic of their abusers, this is not something that occurs overnight, nor merely due to a change in mindset alone. This takes months, if not years of therapy to overcome, as one often does not become the victim of abuse unless one in some sense thinks so little of themselves as to agree with their abuser’s logic. To say one should adopt a growth mindset rather than relive the trauma is the equivalent of saying ‘get over it already’. It’s not helpful.

Even when it comes to trauma created by natural rather than man-made causes, it is difficult to immediately give meaning to the chaotic cosmos that creates such absurd outcomes. Young people die from cancer or rare diseases. Old people live well beyond the point of any enjoyment out of life. Natural disasters wipe out entire towns. Keith Richards is alive and well. Albert Camus called these kinds of bizarre surprises ‘the absurd’ because there’s no other way to explain the fundamental lack of logic in existence.

It’s like the problem of induction: just because you have consistent proof that the world works a certain way doesn’t mean that you’re not going to wake up tomorrow to something completely unexpected. As an Australian, it’s always worth remembering why they call them black swan events after all. We just don’t know what we’re going to encounter, so meaning can’t come from trying to control the world, but only in reaction to it.

I think it’s only when one actually makes a choice to consider their life in a different way that they have the chance to learn from past mistakes, from trauma, from that which haunts us from years gone by. But this is not a simple decision to ‘get better’ or to ‘think positive’, it’s instead to actually accept the past for what it is – the past – by asserting a new meaning for their lives going forward.

Instead of ‘I was so weak to suffer domestic violence’, the belief becomes ‘I accepted this person’s abuse because I hated myself, but I no longer hate myself’. Instead of ‘nobody will like me if I speak my mind’ it becomes ‘I like myself, but it’s not in my power to make other people like me’. Instead of ‘I should have died instead of my friend’, it becomes ‘because I know how precious life is, I’m going to live a life that I’m proud of’.

As Viktor Frankl knew, the ability to give meaning to the way we interpret the world, our history and our struggles is transformative. Surviving difficult experiences – and Frankl’s suffering at the hands of the Nazis is as difficult as it gets – is not enough, unless we choose to make meaning from it. Frankl writes poetically about the bitterness and disillusion of many of his liberated comrades, who after returning to their hometowns found insincere pity and a general lack of purpose in a world which had moved on without them:

“The way that led from the acute mental tension of the last days in camp…was certainly not free from obstacles…We have to consider that a man who has been under such enormous mental pressure for such a long time in naturally in some danger after his liberation, especially since the pressure was released quite suddenly. This danger….is the psychological counterpart of the bends…

Apart from the moral deformity resulting from the sudden release of mental pressure [Frankl writes about how his liberated comrades were motivated to violent acts] there were two other fundamental experiences which threatened to damage the character of the liberated prisoner: bitterness and disillusion when he returned his former life.

Bitterness was caused by a number of things…when on his return, a man found that in many places he was met only with a shrug of the shoulders and with hackneyed phrases, he tended to become bitter and to ask himself why he had gone through all that he had. When he heard the same phrases nearly everywhere – ‘we did not know about it’ and ‘we too have suffered’, then he asked himself, have they really nothing better to say to me?

The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one’s fellow man…but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely…

We all said to each other in camp that there could be no earthly happiness which could compensate for all we had suffered. We were not hoping for happiness – it was not that which gave us courage and gave meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices, and our dying. And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness. This disillusionment which awaited not a small number of prisoners was an experience which these men have found very hard to get over and which, for a psychiatrist, is also very difficult to help them overcome. But this must not be a discouragement to him, on the contrary, it should provide an added stimulus.

The tragic truth is that one can always suffer more. The sweetener is that one can always make whatever meaning they wish out of this very suffering. As much as we see endless stories of the victims of trauma inflicting violence onto others, we also see opposing stories of people who have the serenity to interpret their suffering in a new way, to live life on their own terms. When I mentioned Viktor Frankl’s work to a therapist of mine, she pointed out the similar experiences of the recently departed Eddie Jaku, the self-described ‘happiest man on Earth’.

There is no teleology in life. Our impact on the world is fleeting at best. Yet the meaning we take from it is entirely up to us. For me the ultimate takeaway of Frankl’s philosophy is that we cannot find meaning in the world – we have to produce it ourselves:

“The question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?

Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer.”

Media recommendations

A few things today.

Music: It was just recently January 26, and I can’t believe I had never heard Blackfella/Whitefella until that moment. It’s a great song, direct in its message but also profound in its simplicity. Solidarity with each other is something we all need. It’s easy to feel cynical about the pandemic messaging ‘we are all in this together’ when spoken by big corporations, but it’s a message worth affirming in a less hackneyed sense. It’s just up to us whether we act on it.

Video: I found this interview with Viktor Frankl enormously illuminating. In it he plainly addresses the real concerns that people face, as well as the existential alienation that comes about in suburban life. He is an incredible counsel against nihilism and despair, having seen the worst that humanity has to offer. His explanation that ‘despair is suffering without meaning’ speaks very deeply to me.

Books: Lastly, asides from the incredible Foundation series (more on that soon…) I’d recommend the remarkable new release from the long-deceased Viktor Frankl, Yes to Life in Spite of Everything. It’s where the last quote comes from. It reads almost like a beta version of his famous Man’s Search for Meaning, as it consists of transcripts of speeches he gave just nine months after his liberation from the concentration camp. It’s a great introduction to his thought and to his foundational insight that the will to meaning is an essential aspect of human existence. Life does not provide people with answers but with questions, which people themselves have to answer. These transcripts were apparently available in German for a long time, but only recently rediscovered and translated into English. A quick but life-affirming read.

Until next time

Thanks for sticking with me despite the longer-than-usual gestation time.

I’m grateful to have you along for the ride. Please share this newsletter with friends if you think anybody would benefit from a regular dose of existential, humanistic psychology.

Future projects include an Instagram page (and possible meme production?) - though I won’t truly have the time to commit to more regular posts and social media presence until mid-year when I’ll be in the Northern Hemisphere….the absurd nature of existence permitting.

Yours,

Angus