Hints of Things to Come

Hints? Maybe not “hints,” but statements. I think it’s only fair to state what my philosophies and professional ‘decrees’ are about and what they’ve been about for most of my career, if not most of my life.

As the image here implies, there’s a huge schism existing between what constitutes the real, authentic self and what is the deep emotional character of our minds and selves, and what psychology has garnered and fostered over more than a century. That schism, I have called here humorously, a Freudian Slip. And I mean that there’s a significant slip between what is authentic in our subconscious minds and what amounts to a cascade of interpretations, confabulations and out-and-out untruths that we tend to come up with in response to the “tell-me-about-it” injunction that occurs in the psychologist’s, psychiatrists or counselor’s chair.

I won’t go back to the ‘start’ – there’s another post that tells that tale … The Spark at the Beginning, but we’ll talk a little about the results of all that work and how it applies to the underlying principles of Af-x, ECR and affectology in general. So the ‘hints of things to come’ is not talking about a future that’s not here yet, but what’s to come in the contents of future posts.

The SKINNY on the Philosophy of Affectology

If you’ve spent any time reading other areas of this blog site or any site referring to Af-x, ECR or Clinical Affectology, it’s likely that you’ve already picked up on the fact that this work runs in an opposite direction to what our society thinks as being effective therapy, whether it’s labeled psychotherapy, psychology, counseling or in fact any of the other approaches that use TALK as their mainstay.

And by talk, I mean the use of words and cognitive constructs to either spill the beans on what the problem is (an interpretation of authenticity) or spill the beans on real or confabulated events and traumas (also an interpretation of authenticity) that are supposed to have been at the cause of any current problems or issues. So, in affectology and any of its practical applications, ‘talk’ extends to ‘any talk at all’.

Well, in the face of that, it’s to be expected that many people simply question, “if there’s no talk, and I’m not allowed to say anything, how can the practitioner know where to go with the therapy?” Good question? But that’s only a good question when you remain fixed within the mythology of “uncovering the secrets of your subconscious” that Dr Freud was so intent on establishing as ‘the answer to good therapy’ such a long time ago.

Go here for more on that.

Decades of neuroscience research – and specifically ‘affective neuroscience‘ – has shown without any doubt that we human beings are generally blithely unaware of aspects of our deep emotional core and that these very important influential drivers of our emotions, behaviors and mental states can’t be accessed using ‘words’ and ‘thoughts’ – narrative and cognition.

For a detailed look at the cascade of unconscious dynamic that leads us from very early emotional learnings (neuro-acquisitions) through our life from infancy to now, there’s a good summary on this page of the general affectology site.

Freud got it right for his day. Or at least, he provided an important step for a professional look at this mysterious “subconscious.” But the science has moved much further in modern times. Like modern jetliners have slipped way past the Wright Brothers’ invention, and even the ubiquitous DC3, then smart therapy has slipped well away from Dr Freud‘s idea that ‘the subconscious had to be uncovered and analyzed in order for change to take place’.