Metaphysical double bind
[a couple in a restaurant]
She (moving towards him the dish with the
remaining salmon): I had enough, would you like
to finish it?
He: Are you sure? Thank you. (half-finishing)
Are you sure you don’t want it?
She: Sure, sure, eat.
He eats it all and moves on to dissert. Her eyes
are slowly flooding with silent tears.
He: What’s the matter?
She: I cannot believe that you finished all
salmon and did not even offer it to me!
He: But you offered it to me yourself…
She: It doesn’t matter; a truly loving man would
never do that.
1
I constructed this
ridiculous example some time ago, for the
purpose of giving the reader a feel of how
borderline personality disorder is experienced
in a relationship. This is a classic double
bind, “whatever you do you lose”. A double bind
can be recognised intuitively by its effect on a
person; the mind, constrained by two opposite
messages incorporated in one, usually goes
blank. The example above is very obvious and
simple, especially for a normal healthy psyche.
“She” is mad, a healthy outsider (i.e., someone
who is not emotionally involved with “her”) may
say; she offered “him” to eat and then turned it
against him; she is senile – forgot what she was
saying or she is just a nasty sadist. It is very
natural, I repeat, for a healthy outsider, to
conclude those things but there is one factor
that changes the whole picture, a personal
involvement with “her”. She blames him for the
lack of love for her, and her reaction (tears)
convinces him that “there is something there”,
he is guilty otherwise she would not be so
upset. The seed of doubt is dropped into the
psyche, the tiny “what if?” And, if his psyche
has some suitable cracks the seed will begin
growing, suffocating him and changing his
picture of himself and of the world altogether
into her pathological one.
The double bind above
has multiple sub-mechanisms which make it work;
one of them is a subtle swap of a cause and an
effect. “I am guilty because she is upset” is an
aberration of “I did a wrong thing – she is
upset”. Note, the second phrase is legitimate if
the person indeed did something wrong. The first
phrase is legitimate as a pretext for
self-examination; to be able to consider the
possibility of one’s own fault is a quality of a
normal psyche and the basis for normal living
with others. Hence “I may be guilty because she
is upset” sounds as if it is a normal, habitual
line of thought, and this habitual normality of
the thoughts, unchallenged by logic and
unverified by the facts, is what makes a double
bind work, to the point that even the
irrationality of the stated reason for feeling
guilty (eating the offered fish) cannot remove
the self-doubt. Next this self-doubt is
strengthened by the maxim which anyone in a
relationship probably heard at least once: “a
truly loving man (or woman) would never do
that”. Would never do what? – Never eat what was
pushed upon him? – No, cause tears. And, since
he indeed caused her tears – it does not matter
how – he is “not loving” and his guilt is
proven, over logic and over reason.
It is probably clear
now that a double bind always relies on a very
strong primordial emotion, typically guilt,
shame or fear, especially something to do with
the self-image, for example, the fear or shame
of appearing to be non-loving, non-likable,
egotistic, rude etc. Being considered without
the constraint of an immediate emotional
involvement, the story boils down to the
following: “Even if you offer me something you
do not want I should never accept it because you
then will blame me for what I accepted; you set
up the traps; you do not want to give me
anything; when you are giving you do that only
for the purpose of taking it back and even more,
to rob me off myself, to destroy me, to make me
a non-person”. Here we can see how the double
bind, being stripped from emotional covers,
encapsulates the very essence of the
relationship which is nothing, zero, an
illusion.
It is necessary to
state that, despite the sheer irrationality of a
double bind, the only person who is completely
immune to it is one who absolutely does not care
about others and their opinions i.e. a
psychopath – or a saint who cares but is not
affected by manipulation because there is
nothing in his psyche that such manipulation can
use.
I recalled the example
of a double bind while trying to place myself in
the position of someone who believes in
“something there” i.e. not God the Person of
Christians or Jews but “something”, “a higher
power”, “the force” etc. That was a deliberately
non-intellectual exercise similar to one of
those found in ‘Schema Therapy’ but in reverse
mode. ‘Schema Therapy’ uses a strong [supposedly
misplaced] feeling which one is experiencing to
locate a situation in the past where it belongs,
I used the situation, “me and an impersonal god”
to produce the feeling. That feeling was of
coldness, emptiness and futility. It was
impossible for me to see any attraction or
benefit of such a god – and the double bind came
to my mind, of agnostics and of believers in an
impersonal god, “the Christian God is a
self-construct of those who need a personal
god”.
This statement rings
familiar. It sounds habitual and yet very
strange; in fact it reminds me of something I
heard once, that some artist diagnosed with
manic depression “invented” his disease because
he read that all great artists were “mad” so he
“did it” for the purpose of belonging to the
great crowd. Actually, why not? Maybe he did.
Maybe he did not; in both cases manic
depression does not make him great because it is
his art which does or does not make him great.
In any case, this strange construct cannot
hold on anyone’s straight mind because it swaps
the cause with an effect, a real reason with an
imaginary reason – and even more, it is not even
swapping a cause and an effect but entirely
separate unrelated things. Anyone, artists and
non-artists, can have manic depression; there
are artists with and without it and so on. Why
not then to propose that if someone would cut
off his ear it would make him Van Gogh? Also,
does cutting one’s ear prove that Van Gogh does
not exist, that he is a self-construct made for
the purpose of justifying the desire to cut off
one’s ear? It is the same with the personal God:
if Christians constructed the personal God out
of their need it proves neither his existence
nor non-existence. Because, if someone
constructed anything out of his need –
for example, arithmetic or the personal God –
the very fact of constructing something that
suits his need does not prove the non-existence
of that construct. The number two is handy to
count two carrots; the existence of neither
carrots nor the number two are questioned
[usually], probably because they are useful. Or,
more correctly, one can question their existence
and his own existence as well, but this is
another issue.
Carrots, the number
two, and the personal God differ in the
objective evaluation of their usefulness I
think. Objectively, carrots are evidently useful
so as the number two; furthermore, “the belief”
in the existence of both does not involve
emotions or ethics or morals. Even more
important, they do not involve a personal
relationship. Developing this line logically, I
should say then that the difficulties with the
recognition of something as “objectively
existent” grow proportionally with the
increasing degree of personhood of that
phenomenon. The more the degree of personhood of
the phenomenon, the more the person of the
observer is involved i.e. the more it is the
mechanics of the observer’s own soul which make
him recognize or deny the existence of the
phenomenon. In the case when it is impossible to
deny the existence of another one, a human
being, her of his features may be denied,
effectively rendering her less than she is. This
is a partial denial of existence. The same
mechanics I believe work with God. A person
denies in God what he does not want to deal
with. In the case of the adept of an impersonal
god it is the Person which is denied.
What I am proposing
here is the following. Let us tentatively agree
with the notion that God – any god – is a
self-construct. Whether God exists or not the
god which a human being creates says a lot about
his psyche, about his person. In this paper I
will consider several self-constructs of God and
see how they match various types of human
psyche. My purpose is to locate the metaphysical
origin of the double-bind which was considered
above, purely out of my personal interest in the
phenomenon which appears to me to be entirely
alien to a normal human psyche.
Speaking about a
double bind, the statement “you believe in God
because you are too weak to endure without it”
has a certain similarity to “if you loved me you
would never eat that the fish I offered you”
because both employ very strong shaming. No one
wants to admit that he is weak; the objective
fact that every human being is weak by himself,
pathetically weak in fact and every one can be
broken down if he does not hang on to something
else (self-construct or reality) is missing
here. The difference here is that the one who is
shaming appears to be “strong” because he does
not have an affiliation with a personal God but
this fact does not make him stronger because in
reality he does hang on to “something else”
instead of a personal God. So, it is all the
same – a person who accuses an adept of
believing “a self-construct”, the personal God,
is himself hanging on to a self-construct. If he
does not then it is a case of clinical
pathology: narcissistic or antisocial
personality disorder. In this case the person is
god himself however even in this case the person
holds on to a self-construct, on to himself
inflated to the mad degree entirely separated
from the reality.
It is important to
stress again that all the irrational statements
considered here, despite their diversity, use
the same method of imposing a very strong
negative emotion on another person, mostly shame
and self-doubt. Because the emotion of shame is
very strong in human beings these tactics
usually work: the stronger the emotion the less
noticeable is the irrationality of the
statement. This is what makes the statement
above somewhat resemble a double bind: the
enforced strong primal emotion which targets
self-perception covers the flows of the logic;
the whole situation has a flavour of absurdity
and the person is left feeling bad, with some
vague sense that he has lost and is somewhat
deficient – and there is no rational and
objective ground for this whatsoever.
2
I have never come across a person who wishes for
immortality if such a thing could be given to
him only – all the rest including those whom he
loves would die but he would live forever. The
only theoretical exclusion from this rule would
be the already mentioned narcissist or
psychopath, theoretical because the former needs
the reflections of his glory and the latter –
victims. I conclude from here that a normal
human being most of all desires not personal
immortality as such but the immortal
relationship, with the ones whom he loves. It is
logical then to conclude that, for a normal
human being, to have relationships with others
is a necessary condition for worthwhile
existence. This may sound banal – everyone
knows that a person in solitary confinement has
a very good chance to run insane – but this
banality is necessary to state here, for the
sake of establishing another banality: the
Personal God i.e. the God with whom a human
being can have a two-sided relationship is a
normal and highly desirable phenomenon whether
it is real or not. It appears that the
existential despair of honest atheism derives
exactly from the realization, by an individual,
of the impossibility of having such a
relationship, or any permanent relationship,
with anyone, including oneself.
Anything finite is
pointless (ultimately futile); only something
that continues truly has a point. That
“something” of a person who has produced
“something” must be able to be observed
otherwise there is no point. It is often argued,
by an intellectually dishonest atheist, that he
is perfectly satisfied with being dead providing
his life was useful to others – he forgets
though that he is saying it now, he
evaluates his life now while being alive,
and only his ability to observe and recognize
the value of his life gives it a sense and a
flavour of continuation = eternity and thus
meaning. I observe now – it is “the
eternal now”. But, as soon as he dies –
providing that he is finite indeed – the
observer disappears and the whole seemingly
selfless self-construct falls apart.
Interestingly, even if we play this
intellectually and psychologically dishonest
game in imagination, it always involves the
notion of a continuing relationship, of him and
those who appreciate his life. This picture is
quite far from the world of a pure [honest]
atheist.
I suspect that a pure
atheist realizes the futility of everything,
first of all of his life (however noble it may
be) because everyone eventually would die and
our planet and universe would die as well. He is
intellectually honest and cannot allow himself
to postpone his “absolute and final death” via
hanging on others’ lives, memories, or humanity
as such. All that does not make sense because
any life is a relationship; a relationship is a
two-sides process and cannot exist if one side
is being destroyed. It is very simple. The
example in the beginning, with the fish,
stripped from all pathological complexity, is
essentially spiritual death – spiritual, before
the death of the body. But this is just a
side-thought, association which came to a mind.
Objectively speaking,
ethics and morals while walking the green mile
do not make much sense. An atheist has a choice:
to commit suicide because of the sheer
pointlessness of his life or to carry on, out of
stoicism, for the sake of virtue. The latter
choice, one may argue, is a self-construct which
enables him to carry on.
I respect pure atheism
because it is honest and because it demands a
serious intellectual effort. An atheist usually
goes through an extended period of labouring
with the concept of God; he is not indifferent
to God the Person – God the Person does not make
sense to him, for various reasons but he does
not swipe Him into the rubbish as something not
worthy of a second thought. He may hate God or
the concept of God but he is not indifferent –
cold or hot but not lukewarm. Here is the
self-construct of existential emptiness but the
emptiness which is full of a pain, along the
lines “it will never happen”.
Hence it appears that
the pure atheist who commits suicide out of
their inability to live a meaningless life is
probably the only human being who refuses to
have a self-construct of eternal relationship.
Hence any such self-construct has something to
do with a life and the attempt to live without
the means to die. And the only intellectually
honest way out of this dilemma is into suicide
or into a search for the personal God i.e. the
real eternal relationship.
One may argue that
there is a pointless circle here and that there
is no difference between making a self-construct
of some impersonal “relationship” and claiming
that one has a relationship with the personal
God. It is not so because the self-construct of
a substitute for a personal relationship (a life
“for the goodness of life as such”, usefulness
for the human race or “there is a something
there so it will be all right eventually” etc)
does not require a response from the “human
race” or from “something there” but a
relationship with God the Person requires
nothing less than the response of God. This is
probably why the first option looks very safe
and requires very little maintenance effort.
3
I am sure that others had already said something
similar to what I am going to say here because
it is so obvious, that the vague faith in
“something there”, faith in “mother-nature” or
something benevolent that “gives energy” etc is
very reminiscent of how a newborn baby sees his
mother. A mother, just like “something there” is
supposed to protect and feed her baby, now an
adult; all that is required of him is to know
that she is there and to accept the fact that
she cares. However, in the case of a baby this
situation quickly changes because he is
developing and is demanded to learn certain
things, “good” and “bad”, desirable and
undesirable behaviour and so on. Those aspects
of self-discipline and progressive personal
development are usually absent in those
believers in “something there” which tends to
“love them as they are”. The faith in “something
there”, new age ideas and so on appear to be
very infantile, intellectually extremely
undemanding and very much on the “consumerist
end” meaning that a human being receives without
giving anything back. “Something there” does not
demand that a believer would learn about “it”.
It is like someone would stand under a nice,
warm shower being miraculously poured upon him
without a slightest desire to learn where it
comes, why, and what all that is about. Hence
here is the second self-construct, of a love of
some benevolent mother-like “thing”, an
impersonal mother principal who’s “outpouring” a
believer simply accepts, just like a baby
accepts the love of his mother. The big
difference though is that a baby seems to be
much more interested and involved with his
mother than the “believer” in such a
“something”. A baby is compelled to learn to see
his mother as a person while an adept of
“something” is not. Hence this self-construct,
“something there” is actually a regression from
the mother-baby relationship precisely because
it does not encourage a human being to develop
himself as a person = see others as persons.
What puzzles me here
is the adamant rejection, by the adepts of
“something there”, of the concept of the
Christian God i.e. a God who is extremely
personal and demanding. One would think it is
more interesting, so to speak, to deal with Him
(or with such a self-construct) as an adult,
being much more involved, but it is somehow not
the case here. The only explanation I have is
that the God which demands two-sided
relationship is “too much” for the adepts of the
impersonal, for a variety of reasons. I must add
however, that in the realm of human beings such
a preference, for the impersonal to the
personal, would be qualified as retarded
emotional development, pathology. This is said
not to offend anyone but simply to state a fact.
4
The Christian God does not just demand a
reciprocal relationship – He is the
Relationship, of Three Persons, the Holy
Trinity. All that I am about to say is written
plainly so I feel awkward to write it because it
is so… normal and even banal in its utmost
health and normality. Perhaps this is exactly
what makes some reject His existence or, sorry,
the self-construct. Nevertheless, God is the
Person, He is Love, He wants to be loved, He
wants to be in relationship with humanity and
each single person. He can be angry, jealous,
enraged even but never manipulative. He loves
tenderly as a mother but in a very demanding
way, as a father or even as a spouse. He is
faithful forever, saddened and even heartbroken
when the object of His affection goes for
someone else instead of Him but He also forgives
because He understands our limitations. All what
was said is an ideal of normal human
relationship and this is why I suppose it must
be a self-construct – it is far too well-crafted
to suit us to be true. Let it be so; my point
here is that all this is profoundly normal and
“designed” to lift an individual up, to improve
him. Hence this must be a very satisfactory fake
for those who wish to grow as persons. But why
then that they cannot stand it? – Is it because
it is so “humane”?
And then comes another
self-construct, of sheer absurdity which Christ
embodies. Here God demands human beings to
“reject themselves” and to follow Him, even to
death and many other, completely unnatural,
things. A believer in such a self-construct is
supposed to spit on his own interests, for the
sake of being with the self-construct, Christ.
The sense of the absence of that self-construct,
of the Person of Christ, indicates that he is
failing (the absence of the self-construct of
the
presence of Christ in the self-construct of
Christ as such, of God, to be precise). This
situation is completely the opposite to the
self-construct of “something there” which does
not demand the personal experience of that
“something”. The experiential reality of the
personal relationship with Christ is the only
real criteria of the correctness of the path.
This effectively makes Christians totally
deluded individuals, idiots who use their
self-construct, delusion, wishful thinking as
the criteria of reality – if it is indeed the
delusion. What I am saying here that it is far
more difficult to maintain such a radical
absurd, faith in the existence of personal
relationship with God the Person than the faith
in “something there” because it rests on one
thing only, the actual relationship which cannot
be proven or explained in the way that
“something there” can be explained. Because it
is personal to the extreme it is extremely
offensive for those who reject it. The
self-construct, the Person of Christ is so
absurd and so outrageously extreme in all – in
love and in demands that it cannot be simply put
aside as “something there” without the need to
do something with it.
I would go so far and
say that the Person of Christ when allowed to
speak to a human being does a thing somewhat
similar to a double bind, similar only in the
ability to change how one’s brain works. The
difference is in the direction and quality of
the movement of a mind. In the case of a
borderline double-bind the mind shrinks like a
scared person: “I am guilty, always guilty, I
must shrink from my existence, become
unnoticeable, nothing”. The paradoxical words of
Christ when He, for example, proclaims
implicitly (in the parable about the good
Samaritan), always leaving room for a person to
make his own conclusion, that all are our
neighbours, expands the mind and the soul. The
words of Christ widen the circle so to speak,
the circle of relationships and the scope of
sight. There is an audible sigh of a relief
there, of being let out of the mental prison.
I got carried away; it
is difficult to be non-passionate about one’s
own experience. Nevertheless, returning to the
non-passionate area of clinical psychology it is
safe to say that although this self-construct,
the Person of Christ is extreme in its goodness
it appears quite harmless, to normal humanity.
It is the ideal of a human being made extreme.
Similar ideas of self-sacrificial behaviour are
held in high esteem by many regardless of their
faith or the lack of such. I conclude then that
the self-construct of the God of the Old
Testament is an ideal of good two-sided human
relationship and the self-construct of the God
of the New Testament is carrying this ideal as
high as humans are able to understand,
stretching them to the extreme of the
superhuman. However, there is no pathology here,
as long as these good qualities are perceived by
our society as such.
The question arises,
if this self-construct embodies the normality of
the adult relationship which encapsulates them
all: of parent and child and of spouses why then
does it cause much more rage than the
self-construct of “something there” that is a
regression to the mother-baby relationship?
Would it be that those who rage do not want an
adult relationship? Perhaps modern falling out
of the Christian faith is reflecting the growing
lack of need or even disgust for highly personal
relationship, that is, for highly personal
involvement with someone else? I do not know but
it appears that those who attack Christianity
while sticking to an impersonal “something”
actually deny the personhood in themselves.
Because, if one does not deny own person (at
least a part of it) how he can be satisfied with
an impersonal “something”?
There is another side
to it, paradoxical and very reminiscent of a
double bind. It is the words already mentioned
above, that Christian faith is ridiculous
because God is anthropomorphised there and such
a concept of God is “degrading” and “ridiculous”
to human dignity. Implicitly it means that a
person considers himself “degrading” and
“ridiculous” because he is human. To be a human
is shameful otherwise it would not be shameful
to see some human qualities in God. And yet it
works, for many; the reason for this may be the
strong emotion of shame expressed by this
statement which strikes a familiar cord in a
psyche of the listener. Interestingly, such
people do not turn the sentence upside down i.e.
they do not state something like “I have these
qualities; the proposed God has them as well
albeit in perfect form; thus I am God-like”. Is
it the unconscious disgust with their own person
and projecting that disgust onto the possibility
of God the Person? To deny own person = to deny
the Person of God is a safe way to exit the
problem of self-disgust, by avoidance. It may be
also that they do not want to be “made in
someone’s image” but would rather think of
themselves as the by-product of some activity by
“visitors from space”? It is very interesting:
it appears that to be created by someone on
purpose, even for mutual love, is somehow much
more degrading than to be “an accident”. I must
admit there is something here I can relate to,
thankfully less and less though. To admit that I
was created is to admit the existence of a
creator, someone who is more than I. It is
painful. To appear from nowhere is easier for my
pride and also does not oblige me to do
anything. It leaves my narcissism (or
infantilism) alone. The price for this is
progressive metaphysical depersonalisation.
And here comes the
most outrageous thing about Christianity, the
Atonement, the Sacrifice of Christ the Creator
because he loves the creatures so much. While I
agree with the theological explanations for this
mysterious fact I believe one cannot
satisfactory explain or understand them
intellectually – they may be only felt through.
I feel somehow that, apart from many other
reasons, God sacrifices Himself so it would be
easier for us to believe that He truly loves us.
And the second: He became a human not only
because He had to pull human nature through
death and resurrection but because by becoming a
human He can desire our love as a human being,
as the Son of Man does, not as a remote God the
Father. It means that it is easier for us to
understand that we can give something to Christ,
the Son of Man and therefore to relate to God.
The Love which does not want a response is
somewhat cool and patronisingly-offensive, I
speak for myself. Only the love which
desperately wants a response can make a human
being forget his inequity and make him equal
with God, in love. It is logical then to say
that the incarnation was necessary although God
could do something else, precisely because
humans are very proud and the only thing that
could make them “go for God” in a real sense,
meaning for relationship with God, is mad love
for the Person of that God. Hence, very contrary
to the authors of double binds, purely human or
metaphysical, Christ does not take anything from
human beings but offers all, Himself and also
wants all. He gives Himself to an individual
freely and demands the same; nothing will do but
a free gift of oneself, out of love for Him.
There are two
important notions here, “to give all = oneself”
and “freely, out of love”, the desire to be
loved selflessly that is very normal for a
normal humans and, apparently, for the Christian
God. And those are completely alien notions for
the “upgraded” faith in “something there”,
occultism that is essentially buying what one
wishes, in exchange for something else. Other
aspects of such relations like the nature of the
forces and how they influence the human psyche
belong to the metaphysical reality; here we
speak of the self-construct which is all about
using some ritualized actions for the purpose of
acquiring power. There is no need to expand on
this topic here; it is enough to say that the
relationships, in this case with some spiritual
forces which is based on a buy-sell principal is
essentially a relationship of non-persons or
those who wish to act as/ refuse others to be
persons. Paradoxically, such a relationship is
often viewed as “less degrading” than the highly
personal but “too human” relationship with God
the Person. Here the absurd flavour of the
double bind is felt again.
What else can I add?
Only that Christianity does not make any sense
outside of the context of personhood, of God and
of humans. It does make sense if one reads the
Old and the New Testaments as they are, being
nothing more than the record of the relationship
of God the Person and human persons. One would
see there the progressive personification of the
human beings, a movement from the tribes and
peoples with only prophets and kings speaking
directly to God the Person to everyone being
called to such relationship. All this is simply
the invitation of God into relationship with
Him; such a relationship is the means and the
reward in itself.
But what does all that
means in the context of the stated topic, the
metaphysical double bind? Probably only that
abnormality is abnormal and normality is normal,
and that Christianity or its self-construct
appears to be quite normal and with a hope,
atheism – also normal but hopeless, but faith in
“something there” is not really normal or very
infantile at least, something that leaves its
adepts in a state of childish narcissism.
Furthermore, the fact that Christianity makes a
sense only in the context of the two-side
relationship somehow makes it more difficult to
believe that it is just a self-construct – it is
really difficult to deny the reality of
something if the only thing that can satisfy the
believer in this “something”, especially if that
something is not just an object of observation
but the Person and furthermore, even the Person
is not enough – what counts is me dealing with
that Person and the fruits of that dealing. It
is hard to fake the Person, an object with a
soul, his reactions and actions, together with
my own and maintain an endless dialogue with the
fake.
However, I have zero
desire to use this conclusion as a “proof” that
Christian God is real and not just a
self-construct. If I did it would be not a proof
but a failure of apologetics because the move
from a self-construct to the reality requires
nothing but the leap of trust, beyond “normal”
or “abnormal” categories, straight into the
experience. And this is a highly private matter.
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