Healthy-Mindedness and the Sick Soul

The lectures that follow the opening three are, Kaag says, among the most powerful in the book. Van der Kolk starts with the one nobody expects a psychologist to write: what health consists of, and why a healthy mind can see the death and violence in the world without being hijacked by it. James's example is Walt Whitman, who nursed soldiers in the Civil War and came out singing the body electric.

Then the sick soul, and a disagreement. James treats temperament as something you are born with; van der Kolk, from his research, says the security of early attachment does most of that work, and points to the James family itself, two famous sons and three forgotten children.

They close on the divided self and its unification, which van der Kolk reads as James describing, a century early, what trauma treatment does now.

Transcript

John Kaag: Welcome back. So you've made it through the first three lectures, but I think we're about to enter lectures that are among the most powerful in The Varieties of Religious Experience. They are chapters four through six, and they basically take up the topics of what's known as healthy-mindedness, the sick soul, and the divided self and its unification. So let's start with the healthy-minded soul. Bessel, tell us about healthy-mindedness.

Bessel van der Kolk: The fact that he even talks about healthy-mindedness is fascinating, because usually we don't. We ignore what does health actually consist of. And what he says is that, you know, we have so many choices to focus on, or not choices, but we can focus on many different things. And there's a lot of death and disease and violence that can preoccupy you, and it can. But he says healthy people are able to notice that but not get hijacked by it, in a way, and to keep this orientation of optimism and hope. And that there are more important things than suffering, usually having to do with connection with other human beings and with nature. And what he hits on, which is important for my work, is about a life of the body. A body can move, a body can do things, and a body can engage. And then he talks about how it's normal for human beings to go through a very complex process during adolescence, where often you feel inadequate, you don't feel good enough, you don't know where you're going. And then he says at that point, you're also very susceptible to get religion and to have a conversion reaction, that we completely change. And that's actually the way it is. But he says the core issue of being a healthy person is to be able to engage and to connect, and to look at yourself as being a part of a much larger universe. And you don't focus on your pain and your misery, but you focus on six lives of yourself.

Well, the pathological mind are people who get very preoccupied with the pain and hurt of their lives, and that's the only thing that matters. And then James introduces this notion of healthy-mind therapy, which I don't quite know what it was, but that reminds me very much of the therapy we like to give people these days, of being by yourself, becoming still, appreciating your relationship of yourself to nature, to your universe, but very much becoming still inside to observe this creature who you are. And that's very much at the core of healthy souls. But oftentimes having an unhealthy mind, being preoccupied with the evil and bad things, may give rise to amazing teachers, people who can guide the way, like Saint Ignatius of Loyola and maybe the Buddha, people who suffer but who help us to make sense of suffering.

John Kaag: It seems to me that James doesn't necessarily offer himself up a lot in these discussions. He's always very reticent to offer himself up as the healthy-minded person or the sick-soul person. I kind of think he ends up being a divided self. But yeah, more on the sick end, probably.

Bessel van der Kolk: Probably on the sick end.

John Kaag: But he picks a few exemplars from the healthy-minded region that I think are really interesting. One of them is Walt Whitman. And I'm wondering why he picks Whitman, if you could speak to that.

Bessel van der Kolk: Well, I think it's a fantastic choice, actually. Whitman was a gay man who tended to soldiers in the Civil War. He saw a lot of terrible things. And then he writes poems like "The Body Electric" and "I sing, I glorify, men are perfect and women are perfect," and that all women are my lovers and all men are my lovers. And he gets to see that the universe is so big and so marvelous, despite the fact that he has really seen a lot of horrible things. And so being able to see the glory of the larger picture and not get stuck on, he could have stuck on the Civil War and how horrible it was and been a miserable, grouchy guy for the rest of his life.

John Kaag: Right. But he sings the body electric, and he says we are all perfect in our own way.

Bessel van der Kolk: He does.

John Kaag: And the thing is that James, in this lecture, he's now gotten up to speed a little bit, and his audience is getting to know him. And I can just imagine his audience, after the lecture on healthy-mindedness, leaving the auditorium, or leaving the space, and feeling sort of, you know, lifted up. That this was, you know, a description about human life that was really promising. And then the next lecture, he sort of brings us back to reality. And it's a harsh reality. I mean, this sick-soul individual seems like the type of person who has gone through significant trauma.

Bessel van der Kolk: But he doesn't mention that, and that's important. But what really intrigues me is that he has a family with five kids. The two oldest ones are remembered to this day, and the next three are completely forgotten. His two younger brothers, fighting in the Civil War, and their lives are terrible lives. And his little sister, who everybody adored, who may be the smartest of the five kids, dies early. And people are glad that she's dying, because she's out of her suffering. And James never asks, why did Henry and I do so well, but did my brothers do so poorly? What happened to my poor sister? From my point of view, we want to look a little bit at what happened in the family that instilled certain things at some point in the life of the family, and that the younger kids didn't get that. What was that? But James never talks about real life experiences as forming that. He makes it also genetic and predisposition.

John Kaag: I know. It seems like he almost feels like these temperaments are something that you're born with. Which I've always felt, along the lines that you're stating now, is sort of unjust and unrealistic.

Bessel van der Kolk: Well, yeah. And we know, if you have more than one child, every child has different temperaments from the other one. And some are much easier to get along with than others. These are certainly very real things. But in our work it shows that having terrible life experiences of abandonment really makes for these pathological characters who are always preoccupied with misery and death, because that was the internal experience, and they didn't have somebody to take care of them to make the freedom go away. In the end, from what we know today, the security of your attachment system has a huge impact on whether you become a healthy, optimistic person, and of hope. And if you were surrounded by violence and neglect, it's very likely that you would become a very pessimistic, shy person, though not always.

John Kaag: Right.

Bessel van der Kolk: 'Cause again, fascinating that people can come from terrible backgrounds and still create something amazing.

John Kaag: Maybe some of the saints that he talks about.

Bessel van der Kolk: Maybe people like that.

John Kaag: Precisely. I mean, I think at least in part I see him giving us the optimistic position in the healthy-mindedness section, or lecture. Then we have the pessimism, or problem of evil. And I, quite frankly, I respect him for bringing that out.

Bessel van der Kolk: Oh, absolutely.

John Kaag: Because people do live this way, and I mean, I'm one of them, a lot of the time. And then this last sort of moment, in the subsequent lecture called "The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification," seems to provide a way of understanding human tragedy, but also a way of overcoming it, or dealing with it in a particular way. And I thought, really, that a lot of your work on trauma and the second half of The Body Keeps the Score sort of resonates with that discussion about the unification of the divided self. There's one particular passage from that lecture where James quotes Alphonse Daudet. And Daudet is described as one of these divided selves. And Daudet says, I discovered my divided self when I was about fourteen and my brother Henri died, and my father yelled in the middle of the night, he's dead, he's dead. And all of a sudden I felt myself to be this divided self. And that is obviously a case of trauma. And then it's also a case that the remaining part of that lecture is the discussion about how to unify that divided self. And I'm wondering if you could take just a little bit of time to talk about what you think about when you think about the recovery from trauma in relationship to that unification.

Bessel van der Kolk: Well, I think, first of all, being able to confront the issue of evil is the important part. James says, though, evil is part of our existence, and we cannot just sweep it under the rug. And it's a very real thing that we are challenged with. And so how do we deal with evil is very much a function of whether we find somebody in our lives who we can count on to be there for us. That's what we find in our research. And indeed, when you see terrible things, part of you is preoccupied with terrible things, and part of you wants to go on. And a very central thing today in trauma treatment, based on work that was already done at William James's time, is that people who get traumatized split, and part of them become very angry or upset, or become very obsessional about keeping things under control. And another part of them may be open and loving and spiritual. And we all are divided selves. And the more traumatized you are, the more division you have inside of yourself. And you may have a very angry person inside of yourself side by side with the person who could be the most loyal, loving friend at the same time. And only if you know somebody really well do you get to know all these aspects of a person. But we have no unified self. Again, Walt Whitman said that I contain multitudes, and we all contain multitudes. And what James already talks about there is indeed what the focus is today, also: how do we bring all these aspects of a person together? And we are pretty good at being able to do that these days. And I think that's one of the advances we have made since James's time.

John Kaag: I read these sections both as directions about where we start from in our spiritual life, but also how we are to become more well-adjusted people. So I really hope that our readers enjoy these sections, and thanks for guiding us through them.