Ecopsychology - The Transformative Power of Home

This article was downloaded by: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] On: 18 February 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 783016864] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The Humanistic Psychologist

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t775653705

Ecopsychology: The Transformative Power of HomeRyan A. Mest a a Psychology Department, Duquesne University,

To cite this Article Mest, Ryan A.(2008) 'Ecopsychology: The Transformative Power of Home', The Humanistic

Psychologist, 36: 1, 52 71 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08873260701415538 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08873260701415538

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLEFull terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

The Humanistic Psychologist, 36:5271, 2008 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 08873267 print/15473333 online DOI: 10.1080/08873260701415538

Ecopsychology:The Transformative Power of Home Ryan A. MestDownloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:13 18 February 2010

Psychology Department Duquesne University

In this article, I approach the meaning of ecopsychology in an attempt to broaden it to include clinical practice. I begin by articulating the history of the word ecopsychology. The etymological understanding of the word suggests the home to be the defining interest of ecopsychology, which includes the Earth, in addition to other meanings of home. I then review The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (1996) alongside classic texts from phenomenology to reveal the profound participatory and formative experience of the home. Finally, I offer my own work on the middle voice to articulate the home as a place of transformation with a sensitivity to both language and the body. Throughout the article, I offer my own experience, a sophisticated approach to language, an appreciation of phenomenology, and philosophical depth of writing to open doors for ecopsychology beyond the classroom and the workshop retreat.

The ancient Greek word oikos speaks to ecopsychologists today, although the meaning it offers might fall on deaf ears. Or perhapsbecause it is, after all, a written word and does not literally speakwe might say it falls on deaf eyes. Liddell and Scott (1889/1995) defined oikos as a house, abode, or dwelling; a room, chamber, or part of a house; the house of a god or a temple; and ones household, family, household goods, and substance. How well this word offers the depth of meaning that the word home today also offers us! Home means so much more than simply a literal house, just as oikos means not just house but also family, a part of a house, temple, and dwelling. The word home reminds me of the place from which Ive come, the place where I find myself as I have been and will be and indeed am. Home holds my comforts, my struggles, my cares, and my longings. Perhaps, more than anything else, home reminds me, as I write, of the relationships that I bear everyday and constitute my experience of the world.

Correspondence should be addressed to Ryan Mest, Psychology Department, Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15282. E-mail: [email protected]

ECOPSYCHOLOGY: THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF HOME

53

The prefix eco emerged in English from oikos. The word ecopsychology offers readers and listeners its etymological history. According to this history, ecopsychology offers so much more than an appreciation and respect for mans relationship to Nature, Mother Earth, or the Environment. Ecopsychology offers a psychology concerned more broadly with a concrete psychology of the home. I find myself, on the one hand, appreciative of what ecopsychology has to offer psychologists, students, and workshop participants. How well ecopsychology has articulated our profound participation in our perception and experience of the Earth and vice versa! On the other hand, I find myself wanting to address my clients experiences of their homes in a spirit of ecopsychology, but feel uncomfortable doing so. Its a shame that before me I find texts that offer profound psychological insights and theoretical tools for nurturing a therapeutic articulation of the home, but, because not everyone thinks of their home as Mother Earth, these insights and tools needlessly limit themselves to environmentalist interventions. Perhaps ecopsychology may emerge with everyday clinical relevance by spreading its arms and embracing the home the way it has embraced the Earth. Perhaps then, ecopsychologists might no longer find themselves confined in their practice to workshops and retreats. The home often appears in psychotherapy as a natural part of the client or patients narrative. Reflection often revolves around the meanings of and responses to the question Where (in what way, or how) do you find yourself? To find oneself in any way or state of being often involves a story of how one arrived at this place. A story of where one has come from appears. This story is often about what the client or patient considers home. Narratives in psychotherapy often revolve around a place considered home. Particular relationships discussed again and again appear in a particular scene. Perhaps these particular relationships have a home in this scene. Home also appears as a destination constantly headed towards or returned to. At both a theoretical and concrete level, people feel at home in certain words and styles of speaking. Home is not simply a place. A reason to stay with the client or patients own language in psychotherapy is that their language has a history that bears their experience and the history of this experience. The client or patients own language may be a living artifact from their past and entwined with their experience of home. People speak so differently in different places and with different people! All homes have a particular way of speaking. Language is a part of every home and people dwell in the language just as they dwell in the home. How differently we sometimes speak when we feel at home! Similarly, the way a person carries themselves physically often changes in relation to different places and with different people. How we find ourselves in our bodies and as our bodies in the world and with other people depends so much on how we feel, where we are, and who were with! The home includes particular gestures that inhabit the bodies of the people who also make up the home. After a long

Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:13 18 February 2010

54

MEST


day of work, I might get home, pour myself some whiskey, and lay myself in my chair for a while. How differently I find myself in my body then, compared to how I was at work! The Earth appears in ecopsychology as the home of all humans, creatures, plants, and places we encounter. Ecopsychology concerns itself with how human beings dwell in this home that we all share. Inherent to the dwelling of human beings in the Earth as their home is an experience of and in both their bodies and their language. One cannot properly address the relationship between human beings and the Earth without a sensitivity to the language about the Earth and the sensing body in relation to the Earth. David Abram (1996) has recently offered ecopsychology an appreciation for the role language plays in constituting our experiences of nature. Indeed, he offers, more broadly, an appreciation of language as constitutive of our meaningful experience in the world. In his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, he describes the changes in our cultures experience of language in relation to our cultures experience of the world and people. He discovers for ecopsychology that how we are at home in our language as a culture is profoundly related to and constitutive of how we find ourselves in relation to the Earth, our most shared home. His discovery may focus on our relationship to the Earth but one may easily experience this discovery as relevant to wherever we may find ourselves that is, whatever we may experience our home to be, be it Earth, university, city, country, family, or friends, etc. What does Abram (1996) discover and offer us? He pays close attention to the experience of the world common in oral cultures and compares them to experiences of the world in literate cultures such as ours. He finds that reading and writing privilege a particular kind of experience. Literate cultures with a phonetic alphabet, such as ours, cultivate particular modes of engagement and particular sensibilities. Abram tells us about these particularities,Phonetic reading, of course, makes use of a particular sensory conjunctionthat between seeing and hearing. And indeed, among the various synaesthesias that are common to the human body, the confluence (or chiasm) between seeing and hearing is particularly acute. For vision and hearing are the two distance senses of the human organism. In contrast to touch and proprioception (inner-body sensations), and unlike the chemical senses of taste and smell, seeing and hearing regularly place us in contact with things and events unfolding at a substantial distance from our own visible, audible body. (Abram, 1996, p. 128)

Reading privileges an experience of the world at a distance. Take a moment to consider the world you find yourself in now, dear reader. I hear the hum of my computer. I see the light on my desk and follow the intricate sculpting of the wood base all the way up to the blinding light bulb. I hear my dog behind me licking her paws.


55


The things I see and hear appear from beyond my immediate reach. My other senses offer a closeness that seeing and hearing do not. I feel my fingers typing on the keyboard, whose keys hold the warmth of my fingers, inviting them to return and dance from one key to another. I taste my own hot breath stagnating in my mouth above my tongue, which itself floats on a warm puddle of saliva. (No wonder the dentist says brush three times a day!) Touching and tasting offer a sense of my body and a closeness to things. A part of reading, which Abram does not address, is certainly a tactile sensation. To cuddle up with a book does, indeed, privilege a sense of closeness. Despite this closeness, Abrams point still rings true at an intuitive level. Phonetic reading supports a world that appears at a distance by requiring a synaesthetic experience of seeing and hearing. Our experience of language perhaps cultivates a broader experience of the world at a distance. Pushing this point further, reading might even train us to engage with the world in a very particular way, rather than another way. Reading privileges the seeing and hearing of some things and excludes others. Abram (1996) suggests that, in contrast to oral cultures, literate cultures ascribe the power of speech specifically and perhaps exclusively to words. He writes,To read is to enter into a profound participation, or chiasm, with the inked marks upon the page. In learning to read we must break the spontaneous participation of our eyes and our ears in the surrounding terrain (where they had ceaselessly converged in the synaesthetic encounter with animals, plants, and streams) in order to recouple those senses upon the flat surface of the page. As a Zuni elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even inanimate rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the inert letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonethelessas mysterious as a talking stone. (Abram, 1996, pg. 131)

In light of this passage, the Zuni elder who articulates an experience of hearing a cactus speak has much in common with you, dear reader! What a peculiar thing reading is as a cultural phenomenon. Literate people hear the written word in their imaginations and yet find hearing a stone speak to be indicative of madness. As a literate culture, we are at home in a world of speaking words and mute things perhaps also a mute Earth. Following Abrams (1996) argument further, phonetic cultures also dictate specifically what the words might say. Not only do words have the privilege to speak, whereas most things do not, words also may only say particular things. Phonetic alphabets, such as ours, require words to be heard and pronounced in prescriptive ways. According to the teaching of the phonetic alphabet, there is little room for interpretation of the sound of a word. Before the Greek alphabet, words could be

56

MEST

pronounced in a variety of ways. There were no vowels in the alphabet before. According to Abram, the introduction of the Greek alphabet fundamentally changed the literate persons experience of language and the world. He describes the change in the character of the written text with the introduction of the Greek alphabet, which for Abrams purposes may be the same as our English alphabet,A text written with the new alphabet had none of the ambiguity that, as we have seen, was inherent in a traditional Hebrew text. While for any Hebrew text of sufficient length there were various possible pronunciations, or readings, each of which would yield a slightly different set of words and meanings, a comparable Greek text would likely admit of only a single correct reading. It is thus that texts written with the Greek (and later the Roman) alphabet did not invite the kind of active and everrenewed interpretation that was demanded by the Hebrew texts. The interactive, synaesthetic participation involved in readingin transforming a series of visible marks into a sequence of soundscould now become entirely habitual and automatic. For there was no longer any choice in how to sound out the text; all the cues for ones participation were spelled out upon the page. Relative to Semitic texts, then, the Greek texts had a remarkable autonomythey seemed to stand, and even to speak, on their own. (Abram, 1996, pp. 251252)


Imagine, dear reader, that the words on the page before you could sound a variety of ways. Imagine the artistry involved in reading a text that would sound to you so differently than it might to me, or to any other reader. To participate in the sound of the word would make of the reader an artist, concretely and spiritually involved with the written text, like a child running through the woods and his imagination at the same time. How stark is the contrast between the reader as artist and the reader of a phonetic text? The words you see before you instruct your hearing. They appear as a kind of program that you process like a machine. You are not intimately entwined with the sound of the text. Your imagination has little place in the sounding of the word, though you might hear it uttered by a particular voice or with a particular intonation. Dont you find yourself radically separate from the sound of the written words in your imagination? I wonder, along with Abram, how deeply entrenched this mechanical experience of the word is in our culture as a principle by which we engage not only the written word but also the world. Do we engage the world as if it were written phonetically? Perhaps to read the written word is also to constitute our experience of the world as a written world. Is this the world were at home in? The phrase a written world bears a particular character of relationship between person and world. To read the written world may be to perceive things and people as instructing us to experience a specific meaning in our minds, imaginations, or inner selves. The relationship between the written world and those readers who inhabit it is a relationship between an external stimulus and an internal response. Perhaps learning to read according to strict rules is also to learn that we are


57

radically separate from the world and others. How mechanistic this world is! How devoid of intimacy it is! Abram (1996) writes,Today the speaking self looks out at a purely exterior nature from a purely interior zone, presumably located somewhere inside the physical body or brain. Within alphabetic civilization, virtually every human psyche construes itself as just such an individual interior, a private mind or consciousness unrelated to the other minds that surround it, or to the environing earth. For there is no longer any common medium, no reciprocity, no respiration between the inside and the outside. There is no longer any flow between the self-reflexive domain of alphabetized awareness and all that exceeds, or subtends, this determinate realm. Between consciousness and the unconscious. Between civilization and the wilderness. (p. 257)


To summarize Abrams argument, reading requires a peculiar relationship between an external instruction and an internal experience. Where has participation and intimacy with the world gone? Can we truly be at home when experiencing such profound separation? What has happened, and indeed is happening, to the world of the children and the artists who experience the world as also themselves? It strikes me as more than coincidence that an objective world described as separate from an internal, subjective experience resembles so closely the relationship between reader and text. How striking that our experience of language may develop alongside our experience of the world and ourselves. By articulating the very lack of intimacy between reader and written word or written world, a profound intimacy between language and the world appears! Language and world, language and Earth, language and home appear entwined. Despite the profound experience of separation they reveal, they, themselves, appear inseparable. In Abrams (1996) work, we see the development of literacy emerge alongside the development of the objective or written world. Literacy seems entwined with our physical senses, as well as our general psychological experience. Our phonetic literacy has some profound relationship to our experience of the world as objective and of ourselves and others as having a wholly separate, internal sphere of experience. Abrams discovery for ecopsychology reminds me of a discovery within developmental psychology. Just as Abram articulates the relationship between language and psychological experience of the world and others, so, too, does another psychologist articulate a similar relationship between posture and psychological experience. Just as Abram finds phonetic language appearing alongside a world of distance and separation, so too does this other psychologist find the upright posture appearing alongside a world of distance and separation of internal and external and of subject and objective world. Psychologist Erwin Straus (1980) demonstrates that how we find ourselves at home in our own bodies relates to the psychological development of the human being and his or her experience of the surrounding world. He approaches develop-

58

MEST

ment with both a phenomenological and etymological sensitivity. Although he lives in a literate culture, he still listens to words speak without hearing only a programmatic meaning. In stark contrast to an approach to language as purely representational, he approaches language with a poetic appreciation for the life and history of words. I find his writing style moving from concrete observations about the human body to concrete observation about language. He notices the development of words as he also notices the intricacies and structure of the developing human body. Indeed, he tells us in the beginning of his paper: We can read mans natural endowment from his physique (Straus, 1980, pg. 142). For Dr. Straus, it seems that reading the body enables his thought. He doesnt fear the distinctly human intimacy between the meaning of the physical body and the meaning of language. In a footnotefootnote number 6 on page 145 of Phenomenological Psychology he ventures to suggest (as I have here and many times before) that metaphors tell us more than we might otherwise think. He first writes, It is interesting to see how greatly language is shaped in accordance with expressive phenomena. And then, after sharing an etymological observation relevant to the word in the paper that the footnote refers to, he ventures another bold and remarkable point. He writes, metaphors do not simply carry over a meaning from one medium to another. There is a much more intimate relationthat between expressive motion and emotional attitude. What a declaration of method he pronounces! How strange that these lines lie hidden in the small print at the bottom of a page! In a funny sort of way, a footnote may be the best place for these lines to be written. For our feet connect us to the ground that supports us. Our feet hold us up and root us in the ground that keeps us from falling. In short, our feet support and carry us just as a method of inquiry carries our writing. I hope you expect my conclusion, which would indicate that youve genuinely understood my joke, that according to Straus meaning its appropriate that his methodological insight appear in a footnote. Now, reader, you might wonder what Straus (1980) means by metaphors do not simply carry a meaning from one medium to another. There is a much more intimate relationthat between expressive motion and emotional attitude (p. 145). And why have I pointed to these lines as a disclosure of his method? Let us sit with these questions. Let us offer them a bit of patience and return to them in due time. Let us follow Straus psychological development of the human being in terms of posture, and I venture that these questions will be answered by the style with which he writes. As we might read a philosophical work, we may read his style or method as both the mode of inquiry into the subject matter and the object of this inquiry as well. We may follow his articulation of the development of the upright posture and notice that the very style of this articulation appears also as a meaningful offering to ecopsychology and psychology in general. What a wondrous accomplishment standing is! The upright posture distinguishes the maturing child from the infant. This posture, which has the erect spine as its essential feature, also distinguishes human from ape. One must only



59

recall the famous picture of a line of evolving primates. First, one sees a small slouched monkey, then in front of him is a slightly larger one, then in front of him a taller-standing though slouching ape, and finally a man with back straight walking as if about to walk off the page. Our very evolution is read as a development of the upright posture. Straus (1980) asks himself an important question for psychology. He seems to ask, What does the upright posture reveal about the character of the human being? How may we read the upright posture as mans nature? Reader, when you stand, what sort of activity do you engage in? What is the character of this activity? What does standing make possible? How does standing change your relationship to your environment, to your fellow human beings, and to the Earth? How might you experience your home without standing or walking? How different your home would become! Suddenly, all that seemed within reach is so far. And yet, those things which were so far, such as the floor, the underneath of tables, and the legs of chairs are so close. You can feel and smell the floor and things so close to you. You have a home that is both closer to and further from you. Whenever I lie or sit low on the floor, my dog approaches me differently. Our relationship to each other has changed. We smell each other. She lies lower than I do, showing her respect. We rub up next to each other, feeling the warmth and texture of each other. How differently I experience both the world and a living creature by not standing! As a child, what might you have experienced in learning to stand? Imagine being a young, crawling child. The indoor environment is certainly different from a low perspective. You must have, at some time and for whatever reason, had the courage to push yourself up on your knees or bottom. In this moment, your arms were used like legs at first. They held you up. But sitting, the arms hung by your side free for some other purpose, perhaps for chewing on or clapping. The next step towards standing required much more courage from you. How many joints must have been controlled (and still are!) to maintain balance in the face of gravity. Indeed, you were and are in a battle with the gravitational pull of the Earth itself. You struggle to find balance in the difficult relationship of your own mass to the great mass of the planet on which you would like to stand. In some way, today when we stand we still engage in this struggle. Straus (1980) reads in the childs effort to stand something characteristic of human beings in general. He writes,Upright posture, which we learn in and through falling, remains threatened by falls throughout our lives. The natural stance of man is, therefore, resistance. A rock reposes in its own weight. The things that surround us appear solid and safe in their quiet resting on the ground, but mans status demands endeavor. It is essentially restless. We are committed to an ever renewed exertion. Our task is not finished with getting up and standing. We have to withstand. He who is able to accomplish this is called constant, stable. (p. 143)


60

MEST


How revealing these words are! Straus (1980) articulates the character of humanity as strong, resistant, and even ambitious, in that to simply be in our upright posture is a never-ending endeavor. Straus goes on to read this characterthe very character that hes just read on the human bodyin the etymology of the word, stand. Here we find his method particularly useful as psychologists and perhaps philosophical readers. Language, itself, bears the character of man that our bodies also bear. Even more precisely, for that last sentence was a general point, the word stand bears the character that the act of standing upright also bears in bearing the weight of the body. Immediately following the lines I just quoted, Straus (1980) writes,Language expresses well the psychological meaning of standing, with all its facets. The coupling of the transitive and the intransitive meanings to stand and to stand something characterizes them as resisting and, therefore, enduring against threat, danger, and attack. The etymological root of standingstais one of the most prolific elements not only in English but also Greek, Latin, French, and German. It may suffice to mention only a few derivatives of an almost inexhaustible store. Besides such combinations as standing for, standing by, and making a stand, there are many words where the root has undergone slight changes but is still recognizable: e.g., state, status, estate, statement, standard, statute, institution, constitution, substance, establish, understand, assist, distant. This entire family of words is kept together by one and the same principal meaning. They refer to something that is instituted, erected, constructed, and, in its dangerous equilibrium, threatened by fall and collapse. (p. 143)

Its interesting how pleasure also appears in relation to standing. How tiring standing and enduring the pull of the Earth can be! In standing, we find ourselves at odds with the Earth. We struggle for balance. The tension inherent to this relationship appears as the condition for relief. The flip side of our standing relationship to the Earth is the enjoyment that ceasing to stand brings. The Earth may be the source of our struggle to stand upright, but the Earth also cradles us when were willing to fall. Straus (1980) points out this enjoyment and captures it in the intriguing psychological images of sex and addiction,Because getting up and standing are so demanding, we enjoy resting, relaxing, yielding, lying down, and sinking back. There is the voluptuous gratification of succumbing. Sex remains a form of lying down or, as language says, lying or sleeping with. Addicts, in their experience, behavior, and intention, reveal the double aspect of sinking back and its contrast to being upright. A symposium found the ancient Greeks, a convivium the Romans, stretched on their couches until, after many libations to Dionysus and Bacchus, they finally sank to the ground. (p. 144)


61


It makes common sense that our struggle with the gravity of the Earth should construct our experience of enjoyment. Success in this struggle is not the end of our relationship to the Earth, but, in fact, is the beginning of a developing relationship that constructs not only our enjoyment, but our relationship to the world in general. And also our experience of home! The enjoyment of lying down, sitting, and especially sleeping occur in the home. Often, a persons home may be identified as the place where they find rest and lay their head. The upright posture constructs our experience of home by both our struggle to remain upright and our enjoyment of ceasing to be upright. Reader, imagine again what the world of a crawling child is like. Or perhaps imagine how different the world of a person with paralyzed legs must be. This persons experience is not lessened. But their relationship to things around them is different than the experience of walking people. Their perspective is different: Things are seen from the vantagepoint of sitting, even while moving. The length of their reach is significantly shorter without their legs to step toward things with. Imagine the difficulty stairs pose. Imagine how difficult high shelves and cabinets must be. Wonder at how ones personal space changes when the wheelchair becomes the carrier of your body. Wonder also at the rootedness one might feel, sitting always and finding balance securely in the face of the Earth. Imagine how the experience of home might be. Imagine the difficulty one might experience getting out of the wheel chair to get into bed or into the tub. These are different experiences of our struggle with the pull of the Earth. As children, we experienced something of these difficulties in learning to stand. Rising upright changes our perspective. The heights of the world appear within our grasp. Things on shelves or high tables suddenly appear before our eyes. On the other hand, suddenly were unstable. We might fall at any turn. The comfort and security of our quadruped existence has been left behind. In a way, moving becomes easier and less cumbersome, for by walking we really control and direct ourselves as we fall. We master the pull of the Earth by our motions. But at what cost might we gain such a powerful mastery? In mastering the Earth, dont we also distance ourselves in some way? Straus (1980) points to three consequences born from our upright posture. The first well turn to is the distance from things. Straus writes,Distance from things. In upright posture, the immediate contact with things is loosened. A child creeping on his hands and knees not only keeps contact with the ground but is, in his all-fours locomotion, like the quadrupeds, directed toward immediate contact with things. The length-axis of his body coincides with the direction of his motion. With getting up, all this changes. In walking, man moves his body in a parallel transposition, the length-axis of his body at a right angle to the direction of his motion. He finds himself always confronted with things. Such remoteness enables him to see things, detached from the immediate contact of grasping and incorporating, in their relation to one another. Seeing is transformed into looking at. The hori-

62

MEST

zon is widened, removed; the distant becomes momentous, of great import. In the same measure, contact with near things is lost. (p. 144)


The perspective of a standing and walking person distinguishes itself as a vantagepoint. Like a person atop a mountain looking out at the trees, patchwork fields, and the horizon, the walking person surveys the expanse of space around him. We can see much farther and even see an above-us and a below-us. Everything is at a distance, either great or small. Just as Abram (1996) found literacy privileging our distance senses (sight and hearing), so too has Straus (1980) found the upright posture privileging these very same senses in a similar way. Were uniquely removed from the environment we inhabit as we walk through it. Were so remote that we may walk in one direction while looking in another. Our eyes, being in our head, freely move left and right, up and down. The nearness of things has drifted into the expanse of space beyond us. Overcoming dependence on things around us for support, we also lose a symbiotic closeness with our environment. Its not that this symbiosis is lost, exactly. Rather, its become more refined and less obvious to our senses. Corresponding to this shift, Straus draws on the different language used to describe upright experience. When upright, everything is looked at and we confront things. These words manifest the physical distance of our experience of things, including things in our homes. Similarly, we encounter other people at a distance. Standing straight up, we must constantly resist falling into each other. Touching becomes a conscious, rather than necessary, act of relating. In the act of hugging, grappling, and even shaking hands, we risk our secure, standing position. Standing upright, we must risk our balance to explore another persons texture or their scent (unless, of course, they stink or wear too much perfume). Our sense of sight and hearing those senses suited for distancebecome the privileged mediums of contact with others while our senses that require closeness, namely touching, tasting, and smelling, become devalued and less appreciated. Straus (1980) stresses both the physical character of our relationship to each other as we stand upright as well as the language that captures the same character of this physical relationship and the gestures it enables. He writes,Distance from fellow-men. In upright posture, we find ourselves face to face with others, distant, aloofverticals that never meet. On the horizontal plane, parallel lines converge toward a vanishing point. Theoretically, the vanishing point of parallel verticalsto which we are comparable, standing vis--visis in infinite distance. In the finiteness of seeing, however, parallel verticals do not meet. Therefore, the strict upright posture expresses austerity, inaccessibility, decisiveness, domination, majesty, mercilessness, or unapproachable remoteness, as in catatonic symmetry. Inclination first brings us closer to another. Inclination, just like leaning, means literally bending out from the austere vertical. (p. 145)


63


How separately we exist when we stand and walk. To be upright is to be free, but also to be individual. Independence comes at the cost of a certain necessary investment in and dependence on the community of people and things around you. The return to this dependence occurs often in the home. Isnt the bed the place where intimacy appears? Arent we the most at home with the ones we rest with or sleep beside? To stand truly is majestic and austere. To lie down with someone is humbling. To be upright is to unify ones body and claim independence from other people. To lie next to someone is to admit vulnerability. To be upright is to master ones environment. To be upright is to necessarily be faced with choices. To lie down is to necessarily make yourself at home exactly where youre at, whether youre comfortable or not. To stand upright with head high appears as the emblem of democracy. Its a curious coincidence that the upright posture erects the spine so as to make it appear like the word I. A person achieves by his or her uprightness a peculiar unity that defines us without reference to our environment except for the pull of the Earth, but even that we so quickly forget. We become a body that needs only itself to do what we wish. Straus (1980) goes so far as to claim that the upright posture is mastered by the child at the same time that the word I appears in the childs vocabulary and in turn is mastered as well:Distance from the ground. In getting up, we gain the freedom of motion and enjoy it, but, at the same time, we lose secure contact with the supporting ground, with Mother Earth, and we miss it. We stand alone and have to rely on our own strength and capacities. With the acquisition of upright posture, a characteristic change in language occurs. In the early years, when speaking of himself, a child uses his given name. However, when he has reached the age when he can stand firmly on his own feet, he begins to use the pronoun I for himself. This change marks a first gaining of independence. Among all words, I is a most general word. At the same time, it has a unique meaning for every speaker. In using the word I, I oppose myself to everyone else, who, nevertheless, is my fellow-man. (p. 144)

How remarkable a correlation! I hope the connection between our bodies and our words strikes you. I hope that you clearly see what Straus (1980) meant in that footnote which reads: metaphors do not simply carry over a meaning from one medium to another. There is a much more intimate relationthat between expressive motion and emotional attitude (p. 145). Our bodies develop alongside our developing language. Straus articulates the development of the upright posture and its consequences in such a clear way that he appeals to common sense. And yet, as I often find with common sense, the words bear a depth of insight that doesnt simply carry over into our experience of language. I appreciate Straus style. He subtly concerns himself with a radical understanding of the body one that bears witness to the body and language as well. Language develops not simply like a body. It de-

64

MEST

velops as a body and alongside the body. Bodies of language always bear our experience. Our language changes as our bodies change, for both body and language bear the weight of our experience of the world. Alongside Straus, we have dwelled in language with an etymological spirit. Words have a history of their own, which endures through time. The written world we found with Abram (1996) appears radically different! That world is the world of Websters Dictionary, in which every word has a clearly defined meaning without any appreciation or respect for the development of that meaning or its roots. In Websters Dictionary, words have no life. They represent a defined meaning or object. Oh dear, misguided Webster! Words are not simply representative signs! Words evolve and change with their use. Words bear poetic meanings as well as representational ones. Writers and speakers participate in the developing life and meanings of words. The Oxford English Dictionary does not simply define words. It considers the old and ancient words from which each word comes. It offers the etymological history of the words. For every definition, it offers references, usually from widely read works, to sentences in which the word appears bearing the particular meaning the definition also bears. The meanings of words are continually evolving as we use them in different ways. These meanings are not already determined. Rather, we are constantly participating in their unfolding meanings through time. To approach language like Webster is to distance ourselves from words as concrete things whose history and meanings we participate in as writers, readers, and speakers. How peculiar that learning to stand upright and walk affects our experience of the world in the same sort of way that learning to read and write affects our experience of the world. How might we make sense of the parallel roles the body and language play in constituting our experience of and participation in the world, and in particular our homes? How might we articulate the relationship between what we call home and our bodies and our language? I must admit that before writing this article, I had felt comfortable with my response to this very question. A truth appeared to me some years ago: In our world, there are bodies of language. Has it ever struck you that when someone speaks of a body of language or body of written work that they might mean more than anyone knows? Like a symptom, the phrase body of language bears so much meaning that the speaker of the phrase seems to demonstrate and be ignorant of at the same time. We find ourselves developing as speakers just as we find ourselves developing as physical bodies. Just as our bodies are the medium of our sensations, so too is our language a medium of our feelings. As human beings, our bodies and our words bear our experience. We carry our experience in our bodies and in our words wherever we go. Indeed, we even speak of books developing as we speak of bodies maturing. A book, we commonly think, is a most mature sort of writing or text. A mere page may have developed into a paper that may have led to other papers and



65


finally grew into a book like a child who became a full-fledged man or woman. In the development of a human beingand in the evolutionary development of the human as wellit is the spinal column that structures, perhaps more than any other part, the physical world of the adult, as we have witnessed in Straus (1980) work. To stand upright, to sit up straight, to walk, and to run changes radically the world of human experience. Our arms hang by our sides. Our heads rest on our spines and survey the landscape from the highest point of our bodies. We face those we speak to. Our legs may stand, walk, and run. The hips, legs, arms, and head fully affect every other appendage and body part because of the spine that binds them together into an upright unity. And so we also call that part of the book that binds its many parts together into a single, mature being the spine of the book. As our developmental and anatomical language describes human bodies, so it also describes bodies of language. How similarly we experience texts and bodies! This similarity strikes me as more than appropriate perhaps excessively appropriate or appropriate beyond metaphor. As both physical bodies and bodies of language, we participate in the world that we perceive. In psychotherapy, I find that reflecting on how the client finds himself or herself participating in and constituting their experience of home offers profound psychological and therapeutic insight. This participation frequently takes the form of participation as either a body or as a body of language. The words a person speaks at home and the physical way a person interacts with the space of the home and the people in the home constitute their perception of whats going on in the home. The experience of what home is appears entwined with the language and bodily experience in the home. A client or patient who feels safe only when at home constitutes the home as safety as a physical body. Similarly, the client or patient who curses violently when at home constitutes the home as abusive as a body of language. Ecopsychologists often reference the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964/ 1968). He offers a philosophical articulation of the human being as intimately participating in the existence of the very world he or she exists in. In his well-known, though unfinished and posthumous, essay The IntertwiningThe Chiasm, he writesSince the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivitywhich is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, p. 139)

66

MEST

With reference to vision, we find Merleau-Ponty asserting what we have also found with Abram (1996) and Straus(1980): The world is not entirely objective and separate from us. We are responsible for the very world we find ourselves in, for each of us constitutes this world by the way we dwell in it as our home. We participate in the life of the Earth and the life of our homes. Around the time I first read this passage from Merleau-Ponty, I had a revealing personal experience at home. On Sunday morning, I often lie in bed. Its the one day that both my girlfriend, Emily, and I have off from work. This Sunday, like other Sundays, I found myself awake, lying in bed, with Emily asleep on my chest, one of her legs thrown over one of mine, and on my other side the dog, Pooter (Samantha really), rested against my body from my knee up to my stomach where she, not unlike Emily, also rested her head. I value moments like these. Like a pack of pups, we become a mass of warmth that is also a kind of family. What wonderful gestures make up this mass! To lie on someone or to be lied on cannot help but bear a profound intimacy. And what a soothing pleasure it is to feel the warm skin of another feeling your own warm skin. In a moment such as this, a thought appeared to me that has stayed with me: Merleau-Ponty was a cuddler. How could one doubt such a thought! In the very moment that I encountered this thought, I was convinced. Like men often do, perhaps Merleau-Ponty protects what is most valuable for him. For his philosophy fortifies the profound intimacy of the experience of entwining in a lovers arms and sharing warmth with a loyal dog. Reading Merleau-Ponty, his whole style seems to emanate from the experience of touching, gesture, and the sharing of warmth with the world and another. He seems so at home in the world he describes. Like a cuddler, his philosophy bears a feeling that the warmth of the world around me is both my body and the body of others. The whole world appears as my intimate partner for whom I feel deeply responsible and somehow inseparable from. There are moments in life when we determine and reconstitute who we are and how we experience the world. I believe that these moments often happen in relation to the home. With Abram (1996) and Straus (1980), we have found learning literacy and learning upright posture to be important moments in the psychological development of both the person and their world, especially their home. In ancient Greek, there existed a grammatical structurea conjugation of verbsthat indicated that one of these moments occurred in the sentence. A verb in the middle voice indicated that the subject performing the action was fundamentally reconstituted by this action. Just as Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968) writes of the seer as both actively and passively engaged with the world, the middle voice indicates that the subject is both actively engaged and passively affected at the same time. I first became intrigued by the middle voice in a short passage from Jacques Lacans (1981;1997) third seminar, when he references Benevenistes work on the psychological importance of the middle voice. Since then, I have written of its psychological and philosophical importance again and again (Mest, 2002, 2003, 2005).



67

For ecopsychology, the middle voice strikes me as particularly relevant. Ecopsychologists concern themselves with moments and experiences of transformation. The middle voice is the grammatical structure that, by a simple conjugation of the verb, indicates the transformation of the subject of the sentence. Unfortunately, there is no such structure in English. However, we can still identify sentences that bear the same active and passive, as well as transformative character. In English, there are still sentences in the spirit of the middle voice, despite the absence of the clear grammatical structure. When one writes or speaks of a transformative experience, they speak in the middle voice. In English, not having a middle voice in our grammar, we perhaps overlook the important role language plays in transformation. An account a person shares in writing of a transformative experience does not simply represent a transformative experience in language, as Webster might have us believe. The very specific words chosen to represent this experience go through a transformation as well. For instance, a client of mine dated men and slept with men, but never in her home. She started dating one man regularly and eventually he spent the night at her place. Shortly after, he met her parents and she met his and they began a committed relationship. When he spent the night at her apartment, his place in her world transformed. In therapy, she shared the experience of having him over saying Jonathan spent the night at my place. Jonathan, both the person and the actual namethat is, the word Jonathantransformed and took on a different set of meanings in her narrative in psychotherapy, as well as in her world. For the remainder of this session and through our subsequent sessions, Jonathan both the name and the person represented by this nameappeared very differently in her experience than he had before. The phrase spent the night at my place might have been written in the middle voice by the Greeks. The use of this particular verb phrase by my particular client is very powerful. In Abrams (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous, I have identified many passages in which the action of a subject also reconstitutes the subject and the subjects world. I will share some examples from the book, but not all that I have found. These examples reveal not only the experiences represented by the sentences in the spirit of the middle voice; they also reveal the specific words that bear the power of transformation for the reader dwelling in Abrams carefully chosen words. In the following example, Abram (1996) describes the effect literacy had on tribal people taught by missionaries. To learn to read was an action that reconstituted their experience of the world: The terrain and plant life that spoke to them in their home became mute. As we found earlier in this article, to learn to read is an action that Abram strongly articulates as transformative. He shares both the transformative experience represented by the words and his own vocabulary of transformation. Abram writes of learning to read in the middle voice,Christian missions and missionaries were by far the greatest factor in the advancement of alphabetic literacy in both the medieval and the modern eras. It was not


68

MEST

enough to preach the Christian faith: one had to induce the unlettered, tribal peoples to begin to use the technology upon which that faith depended. Only by training the senses to participate with the written word could one hope to break their spontaneous participation with the animate terrain. Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air. (p. 254)


In this second example, Abram (1996) describes the importance of the first breath a Navajo infant takes. This wind that the child first breathes will determine the life and world the child will grow up with. The act of breathing the first breath constitutes the particular world of each individual Navajo child. Throughout his book, Abram writes the verb to breathe with transformative power in other ways as well. He writes of the childs breath in the middle voice,When the baby is born, the Navajo say that the Wind within it unfolds him and it is then, when the infant commences breathing, that another, surrounding Wind enters into the child. This Wind may be sent from one of the four directions along the horizon, or from the Sun, or the Moon, or from the Ground itselfindeed from any natural phenomenon. Of course, the particular Wind that enters with the first breath will have a powerful influence upon the whole course of that persons life. (Abram, 1996, pp. 232233)

Abram (1996) describes the transformative act of an Aboriginal man walking an ancestors track of land. In Aboriginal culture, the land is inseparable from the experience of the stories of the land and its origins. To walk requires the Aboriginal to sing the story of the ancestor who journeyed there. By the act of singing and walking through his homeland, the man takes up the ancestral story as his own and experiences the world of his ancestor as his own. Abram writes of this walk in the middle voice,The Dreaming, the imaginative life of the land itself, must be continually renewed, and as an Aboriginal man walks along his Ancestors Dreaming track, singing the country into visibility, he virtually becomes the journeying Ancestor, and thus the storied earth is born afresh. (p. 170)

Abram (1996) describes the profound effect displacement has on indigenous cultures in general. The land they call home, their culture, and their understanding of the world are inherently entwined. To be displacedto find themselves away from homeappears in the middle voice, for by this action they are also displaced from the very coherence of their experience. Abram writes,


69


Exquisitely integrated into their surrounding ecologies, indigenous, oral cultures were often so bound to their specific terrains that other, neighboring ecologies other patterns of flora, fauna, and climatecould seem utterly incongruous, threatening, even monstrous. While such uncanniness may have helped to limit territorial incursions into neighboring bioregions, and thus may have minimized the potential for intertribal conflict, still there were times when human bands were displaced from their familiar landswhether by climatic changes, by changes in the migration routes of prey, or simply by accident, and suddenly found themselves in a world where their ritual gestures, their prayers, and their stories seemed to lose all meaning, where the shapes of landforms lacked coherence, where nothing seemed to make sense. (p. 269)

In this fifth and final example Ill quote herealthough there are certainly more in the bookAbram (1996) describes the meditative reading practice of a Kabbalist in the spirit of the middle voice. As with most meditative practices, this form of reading transforms the experience the Kabbalist has of the word and even the world around him. Its worth noting that the Kabbalist experiences the sacred language he studies as his home. Abram writes,By meditating, when reading, not upon the written phrases, or even upon the words, but upon the individual letters that gaze out at him from the surface of the page, the Jewish mystic could enter into direct contact with the divine energies. By combining and permutating the letters of particular phrases and words until the words themselves lost all evident meaning and only the letters stood forth in all their naked intensity, the Kabbalist was able to bring himself into increasingly exalted states of consciousness, awakening creative powers that lay dormant within his body. Sometimes, when the practitioner was reading in this concentrated and magical fashion, the letters sprang to life of their own accord, and began speaking directly to the mystic. (p. 245)

On pages 202203, Abram (1996) offers a personal account of performing a meditative exercise. He describes going through a series of actions that transforms his experience of the world around him. He begins by focusing on his sense of time and his breath. Then, by the magic of this active focus, a new world appears to him. We find him writing of this new world in italics. The exercise he engaged in is described in the middle voice. The many actions he performs in a series, which include breathing and sensing the time and space around him as one, appear both there and elsewhere in the book as not only actions but also as words he, himself, experiences as transformative. In other words, the exercise he offers an account of on these pages draws on much of his personal vocabulary, which bears the transformative spirit of the middle voice. He reveals the magical words in his world and shares them with his readers.

70

MEST


In psychotherapy, I find that transformative experiences often occur when the client or patient describes their experience of their home as the place from which they come. The home is the place of familial relationships. It is the place of dreaming. It is sometimes the place of sexual relationships. The home is often the place of intimacy. Transformative experiences occur in every childs experience of the home. In discussing the home, be it Mother Earth or an apartment in the Bronx, the client or patient often speaks in the middle voice. I hear them changing as a character in their own story when they tell the story of their experience coming from home in a new way. Their body of language in therapy becomes something new. Particular words take on new meanings that, as a therapist, I am wise to recognize and follow. Recognizing the words that bear a transformative power and the spirit of the middle voice offers me an intimate understanding of how my clients and patients change and how the people and things in their world change alongside them. Ecopsychologists appreciate transformation through experiences of, with, and in Nature. Their appreciation for transformation may also aid them in individual psychotherapy. I suggest that Ecopsychologists embrace the transformative power of the home as their specialized interest as psychologists. Mother Earth is certainly the home of the entire human race. But not everyone is prepared to experience transformation in relation to the Earth. The language that most of my clients and patients feel at home with doesnt include words (let alone transformative words) related to Nature. But everyone has words for experiences of transformation in relation to the places they call home. I imagine that many ecopsychologists appreciate the transformative power of the home already as psychotherapists. Its this same spirit of appreciation for the home that might bring a persons relationship with Nature into view. Why not broaden the horizon of ecopsychology and practice ecopsychology regularly in individual psychotherapy? Although I dont treat clients by taking them out into the wilderness, I do share in and cultivate their experience of home as a participatory, revealing, and transformative place, which is, etymologically speaking, ecopsychological practice.

REFERENCESAbram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage Books. Lacan, J. (1997). The seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The psychoses 1955-1956. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. (Original work published 1981) Liddell, H. G. and Scott, R. (1995). An intermediate Greek-English lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Original work published 1889) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1964) Mest, R. (2002). The middle voice: The obsession/hysteria of Derrida/Lacan. Unpublished manuscript.


71

Mest, R. (2003). The ill made man. Amherst, MA: MestPressed. (Available from the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, Gumberg Library, Pittsburgh, PA 15282) Mest, R. (2005). Psychological principles of an epicurean character. Manuscript submitted for publication. Straus, E. (1980). Phenomenological psychology. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.

AUTHOR NOTEDownloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 19:13 18 February 2010

Ryan Mest has a Masters Degree in Psychology from Duquesne University and is currently working towards his Ph.D. there in Clinical Psychology. He is the creator and editor of Grammata, which is the graduate journal of psychology for the Duquesne Psychology Department and is housed in the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center. He practices psychotherapy in the University Clinic, as well as in the surrounding Pittsburgh area.

Ecopsychology - The Transformative Power of Home

Documents

Transcript of Ecopsychology - The Transformative Power of Home