Reflections on the Psychology of Dependence and Independence

Carol Albright, editor (with colleagues) of the upcoming Interactive World, Interactive God (2018), observed in a recent conversation that modern chemistry and physics have shifted their fundamental positions. Instead of viewing matter and energy as isolated elements, as they historically did, they see them as interactions; nothing is still and nothing exists in isolation. Yet psychology, it seems to me, continues largely on the basis of a monadic view of mind. Even as neuroscience discloses more about the brain with 21^st-century gadgets, psychology remains firmly rooted in the 19^th century. A modern view of mind would see it interactively, as simultaneous interactive processes within the brain as well as among and between brains.

Imagine a 19^th-century scientist finding a cellphone. He might take it apart to see what is in it, try to identify the parts, maybe move them around to see what might happen. Absent electricity, cell networks, the Internet, other people with cellphones to call, and a knowledge of how to use it, our intrepid researcher couldn’t understand that he holds in his hand a powerful computational and communication device. Thus, psychology and the brain.

For most of human history, we are told people lived in small groups of 50-150 in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes in which everyone knew everyone and lived their entire life inside the group, with-

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in which everyone had clear affiliations and roles. As technologies developed, settlements, agriculture, literacy, economics, and warfare facilitated the development of larger and larger “supertribes” (Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo, 1969), until the empires that define most of what we know about human history came into being. They have succeeded one another at an accelerating rate. By the end of the 19^th century, Europe and the Middle East were defined by the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, German, English, and French empires, which were about to collide in the cataclysm of World War I. It was in this context of interacting cultures and economies; characterized by disintegrating social and economic stability; replete with insecurity, opportunity, discovery, and trauma; and written in money, love, power, and blood that psychotherapy in its modern form emerged. A person-with-problems talking to a person-who-helps for about an hour at a time, repeatedly, about their life, feelings, thoughts, problems, aspirations, relationships, needs, and frustrations.

Marilyn Charles’ excellent reflection on dependency emerges out of the psychotherapist’s experience of sitting with individuals who are dislocated in their minds and in their lives, unable to make sense of what has happened and is happening to them. These individuals are clinging to, perhaps even clung to by, persistent attempts to orient themselves to conditions that are both already past and that in some ways may have never even really existed quite as they are remembered and experienced.

Psychotherapy is more powerful, as a method, than any theory’s ability to describe it. All theories, in my opinion, are mainly there to support psychotherapists in our existential communion with disoriented souls whom we are helping to find orientation in the interactive worlds of their own minds—their own “multiminds” (Robert Ornstein, Multimind, 1986)—and their lives.

So what about dependency, and its cousin, attachment? In those early human hunter-gatherer groups, dependency was physical and obvious. Children needed to become increasingly independent as quickly as possible, from walking rather than being carried; to helping adults gather and prepare food; making tools, clothes, and shelter; hunting; and helping protect the group by fighting or fleeing. Children became adults, pair-bonded at puberty, and were usually dead by their mid-thirties. The relative stability of increasingly large settlements, states, nations, and empires changed that. Parents lived longer, families developed their own

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cultures as they networked into the cultures around them, people would have to keep meeting new people—in marketing, military, religious, educational, and governmental contexts—and children’s lives gradually shifted from the affordances of survival (Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, 2014), to lives in which executive functions, including self-regulation, organization, and planning, became increasingly necessary (Elkhonon Goldberg, The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World, 2009).

During the millennia of slow time and imperial organization of society, authoritative parenting, teaching, and leadership characterized by “reliance on external rules and structures,” as Charles points out, were adaptive. The structures of society, belief, roles in the economy, etc., provided opportunities not only for external relationships but for the internal self-states of the neural networks in the brain (Frank Putnam, The Way We Are: How States of Mind Influence Our Identities, Personality and Potential for Change, 2016). The chaotic disruption of the emerging planetary culture (“globalization”) upends stability, rips us out of our little worlds—for better and for worse—and throws us into new, strange, and larger networks of social and economic activity. So we have to find our orientation—in relationships close-far, up-down (Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, 2007)—in economics, a form of stored social energy that connects us all (Jay Einhorn, “Psychoeconomics: Psychology of Money and Meaning” presentation, 2012)—in all the interconnections of life—then lose it and find a new one, over and over again and again.

This requires a much more sophisticated type of mind than was necessary for most people throughout most of human history, and a more sophisticated type of parenting and education to cultivate it. It also requires a more refined type of leadership in educational, governmental, business, military, journalistic, religious, and spiritual organizations. And, when we fall through the cracks and need a time of intensive, extended reflection to figure out what happened and what to do about it, there is psychotherapy—especially psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Psychodynamic therapy means therapy that engages the various parts of the patient’s personality in order to support an adaptive revision and reconfiguration. The various schools of psychoanalysis contribute psychodynamic models of

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mind, as do models of mind and therapy that overlap with psychoanalysis (Arthur Deikman, The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy, 1982), and are outside of psychoanalysis (Pat Williams, Which You Are You, mp3 on the Human Givens Institute website). The patient is not just reorganizing their various selves in the therapy office, but reorganizing their self-in-relationship with many of the key figures in their life, including past, present, and maybe future. The transfer of dependency from others—parents, other authority figures—to the therapist is seen by some analysts as a necessary step toward the patient’s reclaiming their autonomy and revising, in a healthier way, their role in the important attachment relationships in their life. Other therapists see the therapeutic relationship, rather than the figure of the therapist, as being the vehicle, so to speak, in which the client travels from more dependent and unhealthily attached patterns in life to healthier, “eye-level” relationships (Arthur Deikman, Personal Freedom: On Finding Your Way to the Real World, 1976).

The rising incidence of mental illness/addiction/emotional/behavioral disorders is both a symptom and a result of the rapid disorienting changes in societies, including their economies, systems of government, and beliefs around the earth. As psychotherapists, we are challenged and tasked to help people, one by one, find their way to a better personal adaptation. Yet the question remains: what methods can we bring to childrearing, childhood education, psychological and spiritual teaching, and learning at various stages of life to help people cultivate the cognitive/affective/perceptual/executive skills that life in this increasingly complex world seems to require?

This is where those of us who work in the psychological or the spiritual worlds need to be careful that our own dependency and attachment needs don’t get the better of us by clinging to a received wisdom or a one-size-fits-all treatment, belief, or practice. Every human being is uniquely interactively networked within himself and within life at every moment. “We are waves whose stillness is non-being. We are alive because of this, that we have no rest” (Abu-Talib Kalim, in Idries Shah’s The Way of the Sufi, 1991). Recognizing that, and addressing it, is the opportunity, calling, and challenge of psychotherapy, as well as of parenting, teaching, and being in all our relationships—ultimately being members of the human community.

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