Co-Counselling International (UK)

Catharsis in human development

John Heron

1977, revised edition 1998

Foreword

In the 1977 Foreword I wrote:
"This handbook offers a comprehensive theory of human catharsis. Its general purpose is to provide a rationale for the aware use of cathartic interventions in education for personal development in interpersonal skills training. Its more specific purpose is to provide a theoretical complement to my practical manual on co-counselling techniques. The ideas presented here do not, of course, constitute the theory of the human condition that underlies co-counselling, but simply a theory. In principle it is open to revision as a function of applying it in co-counselling experience and practice, or in any comparable situation that allows an experiential research paradigm to be applied. The Contents provide a convenient conceptual map for getting an overview of the theoretical structure and for picking out items for ready reference."
The manual referred to here is Co-Counselling Manual. John Heron, 3rd revised edition 1998

In this 1998 revision, I have made some textual changes, and  I have rearranged the sequence of chapters, putting the first four chapters of the first edition at the end of this second edition, in order to make the whole thing more immediately accessible. These four chapters, Chapters 4 to 7 below, present a theory of human nature and the human condition which underpins the discussion of issues in the first three chapters.

The 1977 first edition already pointed beyond itself in the following brief statement: "The fact that the intrinsic stresses of the human condition are such that human behaviour can break down into distorted and perverted forms is itself a kind of meta-challenge - to transpersonal development, in my view. The first order challenge of the stresses is to personal and interpersonal development, but the continued vulnerability of this achievement is a second order challenge to cultivate the wider reaches of human awareness." The transpersonal, or spiritual, dimension of human experience is included in a variety of developmental settings in the following seven publications. The chapter on co-creating, in the sixth of these, most precisely articulates a theory of the transpersonal context of the human condition, to which Catharsis in Human Development points, and by which it is expanded.

  1. Heron, J. and Reason, P. (1981) Co-counselling: An Experiential Inquiry 1,  Guildford, University of Surrey. A co-operative inquiry on client states and processes in co-counselling.
  2. Heron, J. and Reason, P. (1982) Co-counselling: An Experiential Inquiry 2, Guildford, University of Surrey. A co-operative inquiry on ways in which co-counsellors can handle restimulation in everyday life.
  3. Heron, J. (1990) Helping the Client: A Creative, Practical Guide, London, Sage. Interpersonal skills training.
  4. Heron, J. (1992) Feeling and Personhood: Psychology in Another Key, London, Sage. See Chapter 6: The affective mode: emotion. This chapter develops further the account of personal needs and distress emotions given below, and outlines criteria of emotional competence.
  5. Heron, J. (1996) Co-operative Inquiry: Research into the Human Condition, London, Sage. Participative  research.
  6. Heron, J. (1998) Sacred Science: Person-centred Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle, Ross-on-Wye, PCCS Books. See  Chapter 19: Co-creating. This presents a theory of the transpersonal context of the human condition.
  7. Heron, J. (1999) The Complete Facilitator's Handbook, London, Kogan Page. Facilitating human development in groups.
I am grateful to those with whom I have worked in basic co-counselling training workshops, advanced co-counselling workshops, co-counselling teacher training workshops, in co-counselling co-operative inquiries and in international workshops  - in Belgium, England, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Ireland,  Italy, New Zealand,  Spain, and the USA - for providing the crucible of systematically shared experience within which the ideas presented in this paper - and their expansion in subsequent publications - have been developed.

See also my:

Contents

Chapter 1: The non-cathartic society

 

A. Human catharsis

By catharsis here is meant a complex set of psychosomatic processes by means of which the human being becomes purged of an overload of distress due to the cumulative frustration of basic human needs (Chapter 4: Human needs and behaviour). As defined it is thus a peculiarly human phenomenon, attributable to a somatic being with capacities for love, understanding and self-direction. The assumption is that the high vulnerability of such capacities active in a physical body and world, is compensated for by a restorative process which relieves the person of disabling tension. I shall use the terms "catharsis", "abreaction", and "emotional discharge" or simply "discharge" as cognitively synonymous.

That human beings are physiologically convulsive is obvious enough. Orgasm, childbirth, defaecation, vomiting, digestion are but some of the milder or stronger periodic convulsions that bear witness to living process in the body. That the person, qua person, that is, qua total psychosomatic being, is also convulsive is a notion little understood in contemporary society. We extol the virtues of control of emotion, are embarrassed by much overt expression of positive emotion, and are grossly under-skilled in handling the convulsive release of distress emotions. But the educated person is surely one who can balance all three and be competent in control, in expression and in catharsis.

According to the theory advanced in Chapters 4 to 7, when human capacities are frustrated to a disabling degree, the result is acute psychosomatic tension, the mental component of which is grief, fear or anger corresponding, respectively, to the frustrated capacities for love, understanding and self-direction. The cathartic part of the theory holds that grief is purged from the system by tears and convulsive sobbing, fear by trembling and cold perspiration, anger by shouting and high frequency storming movements. These processes are not regarded as self-indulgence, as getting worse, as getting hysterical. They are regarded as processes that get rid of distress, that restore the person to non-distressed, flexible functioning again. They are processes whereby persons purge themselves of personal frustrations. They are not to be confused with animal processes: they only have a dramatic physical component because persons are deeply involved with bodies, and a stress to the person is also a stress to the body. And just as persons need educating to exercise skilfully their intellectual potential, so too they need educating to exercise skilfully the particular kind of emotional competence I call catharsis. Some catharsis will happen anyway in most people at some time. But as in all other human capacities, full and effective use requires training. This is where there is a vast gap in current educational practice.

It is not possible, therefore, to estimate its effectiveness in a culture where it is denigrated, mishandled and given very incomplete outlet. Hence the need for systematic personal and interpersonal experiential research in this area, a thorough personal schooling in the effects of catharsis on personal behaviour. But the experience is difficult to obtain: the culture hides catharsis (and very incomplete catharsis at that) away in a small corner of the domain we call therapy, and the educational system is devoid at all levels of any training in how to handle effectively human distress emotions. One result is that all kinds of helping professionals (psychiatrists, GPs, clinical psychologists, social workers, probation officers, nurses, clergymen, etc., etc.) have a very imperfect idea of what to do about their often very pronounced psychological tensions.

Hence this chapter is a central one. It addresses itself to an issue of very great practical and educational moment in our culture. And it makes distinctions that are crucial for the effective introduction of cathartic competence into educational practice. The notion of an educated person as one who, inter alia, is skilled in controlling all kinds of emotions, when appropriate, is skilled in releasing distress emotion in an appropriate manner, time and place - this is a sophisticated notion that is far beyond our current educational ideologies.

B. The non-cathartic society

It is not too extreme to characterise our society as non-cathartic. Child-raising practices are largely anti-cathartic: from the earliest years children are conditioned to deal with their distress emotions of grief, fear and anger, by controlling and containing them, by holding them in. Little boys don't cry, little girls don't get angry; little boys and girls soon learn that social acceptance is only won by the complete hiding away and burying of their personal hurts.

The reason for this is not far to seek: a profound parental compulsion. The parent cannot tolerate in her child a release which she cannot tolerate in herself. Hence the vicious circle of repression rolls through the generations. The father who has spent 20 or 30 years maintaining defences against his distress, and who is very closely identified with his own child, cannot bear the outpouring of similar distress in that child: he is compelled to suppress the child's catharsis by persuasive "sympathy", by cajolery or by threat.

The younger the child the greater the tolerance of catharsis. But roughly speaking, any child of 8 years old is expected to know how to hold it all in. Girls are given rather more permission to cry than boys, boys a little more permission to be angry than girls, but the common repressions are much more weighty than the minor differential permissions. The cathartic release of fear is totally tabu at all times and for almost all ages. Laughter is the only form of culturally acceptable release of tension. And although tears among adults are accepted as an inevitable response to great traumas such as death and disaster of all kinds, the tearful one will often be seen trying hard to contain the tears that will insist on pouring out, while the sympathetic bystanders however supportive they are nevertheless expect that sooner or later these efforts at control should become soberly successful. Some people of both sexes have entirely lost the ability to discharge grief, even when the great traumas strike, and can be seen immobile, totally alienated from the depths of their own emotions. In the non-cathartic society, the hallmark of adulthood and "maturity" is the ability to repress distress emotions; and when such emotions do succeed in bursting out from behind the dam, social embarrassment, shame and guilt rapidly try to make good the breakage in the wall.

What the parents begin, the schools and colleges complete and hospitals cement. While all the great organisations and institutions of our society run on widely accepted tacit norms of emotional repression. The positive side of all this Apollonian control is that control of emotion is a necessary condition of effective fulfilment of the task, whatever the task may be: discipline of emotion is one of the great human skills that make great social, intellectual, technical and cultural achievement possible. The negative side is redundant control, repressive control, the inability to balance the claims of discipline and control at one time and place with systematic release of distress and tension at other appropriate times and places. Hence the repressive, alienated air of schoolroom, office, hospital ward: no provision is made for, no acceptance is given to, the very human need of human beings to restore themselves to the full vigour of their humanity by the complete discharge of the stressful consequences of their vulnerability. In the non-cathartic society, alienated humans repressively seek to hide their vulnerability under the appearance of strength, rather than find their true strength through the cathartic acceptance of their vulnerability.

The consequences of all this are that distorted behaviour in all forms is rampant. Violence, eruptive and overt, or institutional, abounds. Anomie, listlessness and ataraxia are the order of the psyche. Intimate relationships are smouldering or flaming realms of lucifer. Psychogenic aetiology sweeps like a tide through the GPs' consulting rooms. Sensational distractions from the ache of buried distress mint fortunes for their practitioners. Technology and centralised bureaucracy combine to maintain the passive alienation of person from person in every neighbourhood. The nuclear family is a lethal breeding ground of distorted social practices especially repressive child-raising practices. Education alienates intellect from emotion. And so on and so on.

Meanwhile the number of professional helpers increases. The non-cathartic society abounds in helpers and helping agencies of every conceivable kind proliferating, throughout the medical services, the social services, the educational services, industry, commerce and government. This is the great helping distortion, by now very widely institutionalised throughout our society. I call it a helping distortion because its practitioners daily meet humans locked into distorted behaviour by repressed distress, yet do everything for those humans except train them to find ways of releasing the distorting distress. The result is, of course, that the practitioners themselves experience a subtle but profound sense of human impotence and frustration in their work, and their own level of distress rises accordingly. Yet their very adoption of the "expert" helping role maintains a defensive repression on this professionally induced distress. The result is a scandal of unacknowledged intrapsychic tension among the helping professionals of all kinds, about which a collusive silence is maintained, but to which the suicide figures bear eloquent testimony.

Diagnosis, labelling, interpretation, analysis, assessment - a kind of endless intellectual prodding and poking of the client - is the favoured device of the helper to keep both the client's distresses conveniently at bay and repressed, and above all to keep the helper's own distresses firmly battened down, so that at no time will the issue of the helper's cathartic competence be allowed to come to the fore. A diagnosis a day keeps distress at bay. Helper and client are locked into complementary distortions, and so sustain from without what was originally set up from within.

Of course, this account of our type of society is a caricature. It overlooks the abundance of intellectual skills, of technical and vocational skills, of political and organisational skills, of aesthetic and cultural skills. Yet if we just let our vision operate on the planes of emotional and interpersonal competence, then it becomes evident, I suggest, how universal "illaffectiveness" (as the correlate of illiteracy) is, and probably more so among the highly literate.

C. Dogmas of the non-cathartic society

I suggest in Chapter 4 that the rigid society is the institutionalisation of distorted and perverted behaviour rooted in unresolved distress. I here look at this process rather in relation to our own society. The culture has a legacy from the past of tacitly accepted dogmas that are still very pervasive in our social and educational practices. These dogmas I see as the distorted ideology that is a function of occluded and unidentified distress, both primary and secondary.
  1. The dogma that intellect is the prime differentium of the human being  This Aristotelian dogma holds that intellect  is that capacity which above all, in its developed phases, distinguishes humans from animals.  It is the assumption of our whole secondary and tertiary educational system. We have no concept of an educational system that would give equal significance to human capacities for love, understanding and free choice. The associated dogma is that intellect is to be used not only to control and regulate emotions, but also to repress and contain distress emotions. One result is that we have an educational process in which the exercise of intellect is alienated from human emotion and intelligent self-direction.
  2. The dogma that human nature is inherently bad. Christianity developed the contradictory notion that the human will is free but at the same time has an innate internal tendency to go bad, to make nasty choices. The doctrine of innate nastiness survives in the Calvinistic rigours of psychoanalytic theory, in theories of innate aggression in humans, which unmasked are simply theories that people are inherently malicious. Anyone who works in any depth with human beings in our society will over and over again come across this deeply ingrained and compulsive recording, playing at almost unconscious levels of the system, which asserts in a hundred ways "I'm no good". Basically it acts as a control pattern that holds in a great deal of distress. The educational (and the therapeutic) process lacks any notion of the celebration of personal being, the conscious affirmation of authentic humanness. Adults are deeply embarrassed by the process of openly declaring their own worth.
  3. The dogma that virtue is self-punitive. That what we ought to do necessarily involves a negation of what we want to do; that what is good for us, like education and training, is necessarily also rather painful, frustrating and unpleasant; that the aroma of deliciousness that surrounds "secret vices" can never have its equivalent in the probity of the good life. This is the dogma of moralistic oppression, so widely prevalent in child-raising and education, in which punitive "shoulds" and "oughts" and "musts" are set over against, and indeed used to frustrate, the fulfilment of basic human capacities. The educational process in home and school and college has not yet in practice transvalued the concept of what I ought to do into the concept of what all relevant things rationally considered I deeply want to do. The oppressive quality of old-style moral acts needs to be replaced with the exhilarative quality of acts that celebrate the flourishing of human capacities in all concerned.
These three dogmas are all mutually interlocking and help to maintain each other. In my experience of working with people on their own growth and development, they are still very pervasive in our culture and echo in a multitude of ways throughout our child-raising and educational practices. When through cathartic and other processes, human beings climb out from underneath them, the dogmas are revealed for what they are: the ideological deposit of many centuries of unidentified and unresolved distress in humans.

Nor is the mechanism of this deposit difficult to understand. Once a human being gets caught in the trap of compulsively trying to occlude the dull ache of buried pain and distress, then the intellect will rapidly be harnessed to the task. To the unaware distressed human, the realm of human emotion presents itself as one of pain and distortion, resulting in behaviour that can be a grotesque caricature of animal life. The pure intellect, however, can become functionally autonomous for brief periods, giving temporary relief from the obscure ache of distress, entering a world of generality, clarity and logical connection - as distinct from the everyday existential world of particularity, obscurity and human connection. Logic, mathematics, scientific inference, conceptual analysis and synthesis, are on one rather partial interpretation, some of the most potent and refined anodynes for hurting psyches. Small wonder, then, that the intellect came to be regarded as the supreme distinguishing principle of human beings, and that for a certain type of human being intellectual activity has a curiously compelling, and frequently an entirely compulsive, appeal.

The compulsive intellect, keeping pain buried, will necessarily be unable to grasp the connection between human vulnerability and an overload of distress on the one hand, and distorted and perverted human behaviour on the other. Caught up in the mechanism of repression the intellect will acknowledge only the distorted behaviour and devise a repressive theory - that people are inherently nasty - a theory whose sole function is to keep out of consciousness the buried pain and thereby the positive potential that it occludes. If you insist that people identify their very selves, their given natures, with what is in fact an overload of distress distorting behaviour, then you guarantee by your theoretical prison that the underlying distress will never be released. The psychodynamics of certain parts of Christian theology will repay careful analysis.

Finally, the repressive intellect, identifying distorted behaviour with the intrinsic nastiness of people will produce repressive morality as a corollary. The expression of each inherent nastiness in people is to be controlled by the exercise of intellect and will: duty is a demand of reason or of God or of both set over against the domain of human inclination. Blind to and repressive of deep personal distress, each moral theory demands that people control distorted behaviour while occluding the only effective means of so doing - the release of hidden pain. Hence oppressive morality tends to be compulsively hypocritical, its protagonists lapsing in private into an array of secret distortions or "vices" that symbolically, act out their denied distress and frozen human needs.

There are, of course, extensive practical corollaries of these three pervasive and interrelated dogmas, and I will only enumerate a few of them here. In general, the culture maintains a sharp focus on verbal interaction and is stereotypic in and blind to non-verbal interaction. People tend to work compulsively at their set task, while remaining remarkably unaware of the complex array of interpersonal processes that accompany it and interact profoundly with it. Anxiety and insecurity are fended off by doing, but arise paroxysmally when it is just a matter of being and becoming. It is easier to analyse, generalise and intellectualise than relate in an aware, authentic, open, warm human way. Supportive confrontation is an unknown art, since buried anger distorts every attempt at it into anxious and non-supportive attack. So the constructive working through of interpersonal tension and conflict will tend to be avoided in favour of evasion, manipulation, wheeling and dealing, backstairs politics. Authoritative modes of intervention are compulsively used where facilitative ones would be more appropriate and life-enhancing. Nurturance needs are confused and conflated with sexual needs, physical contact and human warmth is confused with erotic contact and sexual desire, so the whole culture cheats itself of warm supportive human physical interaction. The culture is generally sex-negative, since there is no tradition of sex-positive theory and practice. Compulsive sexuality abounds: the pursuit of orgasm in a maladaptive attempt to alleviate the ache of buried distress, which can only adequately be released in other ways. People tend to have negative body images, and the celebration of the body, of movement, of sensory awareness is not part of general education and culture. And so on.

D. Catharsis in the non-cathartic society

However, no society can be totally devoid of cathartic outlets, for the result, on this theory, would be such an intolerable overload of tension that social behaviour would break down completely. Hence it is instructive to consider how tension is maintained below the threshold of total breakdown. Here are some possible outlets or partial outlets.
  1. Dreaming. The kind of dreaming in sleep associated with rapid eye movements may well have a cathartic effect. Such dreaming involves a minor physiological storm or convulsion. When human subjects have enough sleep in terms of number of hours but are also deprived of such dreaming, their incidence of distorted and distressed behaviour increases. People may wake from nightmares sweating, trembling, crying out or sobbing. Small children appear to undergo some profound cathartic process in night terrors, when, wide eyed, they tremble and scream and sob. Alarming to the parent, this is probably a blessed safety valve to the child. Unresolved distress, one may hypothesise, can loom up in the form of disturbing dream imagery that can blow the closed circuits of repression and precipitate a general catharsis.
  2. Drama. That drama has a cathartic and purging effect is an ancient doctrine. Before the advent of TV, large numbers of people went regularly to the movies, now an even larger number spend much more time in front of the TV set. On the big and on the little screen dramas proliferate: the viewer's own fear, anger and grief rise above the threshold into consciousness, safely projected onto the characters in the unfolding plot. Presumably there is some dawn of catharsis here, which may be given freer reign as tears roll discreetly down the cheek. But usually what the drama fruitfully starts off in the psyche of the viewer, her repressive mechanism quickly shuts off, as the credits roll or the lights go up. Hence the viewer is in a repetitive double-bind: the drama pulls toward personal catharsis, but the conditioning says it is only a story and cuts the personal release off. Hence the viewing of screen dramas can itself become a kind of compulsive pseudo-release. If you are moved by a drama, try following up the associations to your own life, after it is over, and let the purging go on freely. The novel, the short story, the play read rather than viewed, may have a similar effect.
  3. Music and poetry. For many people the aesthetic emotions aroused by music and song may have an intermittent, incidental, cathartic effect in an overflow of tears. The same applies to poetry. Conversely some music way be used as a decibel laden anodyne temporarily to blot out the obscure ache in the gut.
  4. Competitive sport, vigorous bodily activity, dancing. Some top layers of fear and of anger may be superficially eased by these activities, and by vociferous spectators of them too.
  5. Response to nature. I know people who are moved to tears by trees and flowers, by sudden vistas of mountain and valley, by oceans, seas and rivers, by dawns and sunsets, stars and moon.
  6. Post-orgiastic catharsis. In my informal surveys some people report that, on a relatively small number of occasions, orgasm will be unaccountably followed by trembling, sobbing, laughing. This is usually in the context of a deeply intimate and loving relationship.
  7. Permissive intimacy in the family, between friends and lovers. In such intimate settings, a greater or lesser degree of catharsis will be tolerated, accepted, or even actively supported and encouraged.
  8. Transpersonal activities. For some people, prayer, worship, praise, meditation may have incidental cathartic effects.
  9. Laughter. This is probably the primary source of cathartic relief in our society, discharging the light fears and angers of social embarrassment. But notice the significant pall when the laughter dies, the comedy ends: as though there is a brief glimpse of the deeper layers of distress temporarily uncovered by the release of laughter - but there is no facility to deal with them, so on with the show, on with life.

Chapter 2: Human catharsis

A. Catharsis as such

The following account is based on intensive work done in co-counselling over many years. The focus throughout is on the discharge of what I have called personal as distinct from physical distress.
  1. The discharge of grief occurs through crying and sobbing. The repressed client will permit the tears but restrain the sobbing, yet the deeper layers of pain are released in uninhibited convulsive sobbing. Aware physical support, holding, embracing may be needed by the client for her to feel secure enough to allow this convulsion to occur. As the physiological process occurs, the pain of separation, of love frustrated pours into consciousness and is fully experienced.
  2. The discharge of fear occurs through trembling and cold perspiration. The limbs, hands, head and neck and trunk, jaw are caught up in a high frequency trembling, while the person experiences the fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the psychological invasion or threat, of lack of comprehension. The fear discharged may be a fear of unfamiliar positives such as love, ecstasy, orgasm, pleasure, as well as unfamiliar negatives. Fear especially seems to lock and block automatically in the system, and it can be a revelation to the withdrawn, dogmatic, isolated person to experience the dissolution of that rigidity in the release of fear.
  3. The discharge of anger occurs through an uninhibited high-frequency burst of sound and storming movements. It is righteous indignation mobilising the breath, the voice and the whole musculature, arms, legs and pelvis: the protest "How dare you!" released somatically. Repressive controls inhibit sound and movement through muscular contraction: and the client will often need training and encouragement to remove these blocks. The associated experience is that of extreme, fiery indignation and protest.
  4. The discharge of embarrassment occurs through full, uninhibited laughter. The top layer of embarrassment appears to be a light social fear of what other people will think, say or do about one's appearance or behaviour. A slightly deeper layer is that of light indignation at such intimidation. The combination releases as laughter. A person who is open to the release of distress will find that laughter may pass over suddenly into the trembling release of fear or the storming release of anger, deeper tensions which the release of surface embarrassment uncovers. As the laughter of embarrassment rolls off, the experience is that of the break up of the previously unidentified rigid fear of the opinion of others.
  5. The discharge of guilt and shame. Guilt or remorse is to be distinguished from shame. Guilt is the distress emotion that can arise with the realisation that one has hurt another person, whereas shame is the distress emotion associated with the realisation that one's behaviour has been inadequate, has let the side down, has fallen short of expected standards, even though nothing hurtful has been done.
  6. The discharge of disgust. Disgust is a distress emotion closely associated to physical nausea, hence part of the discharge may be a genuine vomit reflex or a symbolic or pseudo vomit reflex. Disgust, as a personal distress, as distinct from the purely physical disgust reaction to an unpleasant smell or other noxious stimulus, is a distress emotion that may arise in response to chronically distorted behaviour in oneself or in others. Apart from the actual or symbolic vomit reflex the discharge of disgust largely reduces to the discharge of fear through trembling, since in my view the core of personal disgust is fear at the invasion of the psyche or of relationships by blind, irrational, distorting energies, with associated grief at the interruption of shared loving thus induced.
  7. The discharge of boredom. Boredom, like guilt, shame and disgust, can be a reflexive distress. Behaviour already shut-down and distorted, so that genuine options and possibilities are internally restricted, the person feels bored. It can also be a genuine frustration induced by an uninteresting meeting or encounter. The underlying core distress appears to me to be anger, and is discharged accordingly.
  8. The discharge of physical fatigue and tension as such. All catharsis of personal distress involves a release of somatic as well as emotional tension. But there are clearly physical tensions sui generis, such as fatigue and muscle tension that cannot be reduced back to psychogenic factors. The discharge of these appears to involve deep, repetitive yawning and stretching.

B. Components of cathartic release

Catharsis is much more than mere emoting, A comprehensive account includes, in my experience. the following:
  1. Balance of attention. The person is aware of, in touch with, the distress emotions, but also has some awareness focused outside the distress - on the supportive presence of another person, on some thoughts, words that contradict (but do not repress) the pain of the distress. When attention is balanced in this way between the distress and what is outside it, a psychodynamic leverage is maintained that tips the distress emotions into discharge. Buried pain, when strongly activated just below the threshold of experience of it, soaks up awareness and attention: the client is in a heavy, down, immobile, depressed emotional state and is either heavily resistant to catharsis or cannot elicit it if she wants to. When a person is sunk or swamped by heavy distress in this way, then she needs to take some attention away from distress emotions (without repressing them) in order to liberate enough conscious slack in the system to free the discharge. If I go away from distress emotions but remain open to them, then by the play of opposites they are ineluctably drawn upward from their buried place toward discharge, If the whole psychosomatic system is absorbed in and tight with tension, release of tension cannot get started. The person needs consciously to disidentify a little from the taut system - then the liberating discharge can commence.
  2. The release. From the zone of free attention, the person takes off the inhibitory control and lets the somatic convulsions - the sobbing, the trembling, the storming, the laughing - occur, while experiencing, opening consciousness to, the previously occluded pain of grief, fear, anger, shame. The distress convulses body and mind, but is in turn consumed by this acceptance. The experienced client will avoid premature closure which cuts off the discharge before all available distress at that working level is cleared.
  3. Spontaneous insight. Catharsis generates spontaneous insight, and the insight is just as important and valuable as the release of distress emotions. To return to the record theory, stress inhibits flexible, discriminating appraisal so that distress situations are recorded in the psychosomatic system in rigid, stereotypic way. Congealed distress is like wax on which a series of stereotypic oppressor-victim situations are recorded. The mind contracts under stress, so to speak, so that it has only a restricted grasp of the stress situation - "he oppressor; me victim; no escape; pain and panic, but cut it off and play possum". Elaborated by replays this record can become a chronic distorted construct in the way a person sees and reacts to her world. Discharge of distress has the effect of breaking up the distorted construct, liberating the mind to make a truly discriminating appraisal of what was really going on in the early critical incidents and in subsequent replays.
  4. Celebration. The liberation of distress from the human system is simply a prelude to the celebration that follows it. This is a celebration of human identity, of the re-emergence of specifically human capacities, of being fully present to oneself and others. The post-cathartic person needs space, both verbally and non-verbally, for this expressive delight in her authentic humanness. This is the phase of emergence from the shadow, of reclaiming the heritage of a warm heart, a flexible intelligence, an adventurous will. This is also a phase of sharing, of reaching out to others, of reciprocal delight.

C. The effects of catharsis

Two immediate effects have already been covered in the previous section. I will re-iterate them briefly here, then move on to longer term effects,
  1. Spontaneous insight. This includes re-evaluation of the past traumatic event - insight into what was really going on, together with insight into connection between such an event and subsequent behaviour.
  2. Celebration of personal being. The beaming human person, as distinct from the shadowy distressed person, emerges through the cathartic release.
  3. Break-up of distorted behaviour. As old frozen human needs are identified by spontaneous insight, and the pain and tension that buried them is discharged, the person now has the inner freedom and flexibility to bring those needs awarely to fulfilment in present time. It is thus open to the person to cease living compulsively and to choose to live intentionally - to make conscious choices that relate fundamental needs to present realities. Catharsis does not automatically regenerate behaviour, but it liberates a person from distorting compulsions so that she can freely choose new behaviour. But the conscious act of choice has to be made.
  4. Living in abundant time. Sustained catharsis generates a great deal of free attention - attention that has been liberated from the constraints of past distress. The result is a much greater awareness of present time reality, of what is here and now occurring in the given world, with a greater capacity to respond appropriately and flexibly to it. For many people this is an altered state of consciousness, for ordinary consciousness so often has a charge of anxiety on the memory of past events, which restricts the ability to notice in a thoroughly aware way what is going on now. Distress emotion hooked on to the past puts both very severe blinkers and a distorting lens on perception of the present.
  5. Synchronous events. This is the controversial notion of a greater correspondence between events without and development within. The assumption is that as my own degrees of freedom increase internally through the break-up of old rigidities, external opportunities present themselves that correlate with the newfound liberty to explore new possibilities. Such an assumption rests on a far-reaching metaphysical theory that the traditional notion of efficient causality conceived in terms of sequential cause and effect needs to be related to an entirely different notion of causality conceived in terms of simultaneous resonance.

D. Processes that complement catharsis

It would be absurd to argue that catharsis is in and by itself a sufficient condition of human development. I do not for a moment believe that it is anything more than a necessary condition, needing to be complemented by other necessary conditions before anything like a sufficient account of human development comes into view. Some of these complementary necessary conditions seem to me to be:
  1. Creative thinking. A person needs to think out what kind of a world she wants, what her values and priorities are, what are rational means to rational ends given the current state of play in society and nature. Catharsis may liberate consciousness to think more relevantly and humanly, to apply intelligence in non-evasive, non-compulsive ways. But creative thinking is an independent act of clarification that has to be chosen in its own right. People do not think by catharting; they only think by deciding to think.
  2. Creative choosing. Goal-setting, action-planning, conscious risk-taking, intentional living, fully self-directed and purposive behaviour: again catharsis may liberate a person from the tensions that inhibit these processes, but the challenge of the new inner freedom and insight still has to be met by choosing - to re-structure the outer circumstances of life to accord more with the values emerging within, to take initiative that enhance human flourishing in the domestic, the social, the professional and the political domains. The point about such choosing is that it represents the values that have emerged by inner growth, rather than values imposed by an ideology rooted in repressed and distorted emotion.
  3. Expansion of consciousness. Catharsis functions at a relatively crude level of psychosomatic energy, involving gross somatic convulsions. Transpersonal techniques shift consciousness onto subtler levels of awareness and give access to a wide range of refining and cohering energies. I have presented a typology of such transmutative techniques in Helping the Client (Heron, 1990) together with a discussion of the relation between the cathartic and the transpersonal. The important point, I believe, is that the two types of process, the cathartic and the subtle contemplative-transmutative, are complementary. Misused, either can become a systematic defense against entering fully the domain of the other. Appropriately used, each can balance and enhance in a life-affirmative way the other. And each may produce the other as a by-product. Thus sustained practice of some meditation methods may lead incidentally to the phenomenon of unstressing, when the meditator finds herself unaccountably crying, trembling or laughing. Sustained catharsis brings the person very fully into present time, giving acutely enhanced perception of phenomena and taking consciousness to the very threshold of access to subtle levels of awareness. Finally, there is an interaction of the two approaches which is central in resolving the constraining effects of what I have called primary distress recordings. For details of this see the section on transpersonal direction-holding in my Co-Counselling Manual (Heron, 1998). And for a theory that sets the whole of human distress within a transpersonal context, see Chapter 19: Co-creating, in Sacred Science (Heron, 1998).
  4. Culture of the body. Sensory awareness, conscious breathing, diet, dynamic yoga, dance, movement and relaxation methods: all these, and others, are ways of organising and cohering physical processes, with a significant effect on mental processes. They can be seen as an affirmation and celebration - non-verbally - of human identity, apart from their purely physical beneficial effects.
  5. Art. There is a close relationship between the aesthetic and the cathartic. I have already alluded in Chapter 1 to how various forms of art may have a cathartic effect. On the other hand, art, whether as creation, interpretation or appreciation, may have an effect complementary to that of explicit catharsis. It provides a way of organising, refining and transmuting emotion through the development of and response to symbolic forms. It purges by transmutation as well as by explicit release. While at the same time it offers a mode of knowing irreducible to any other.

E. Cognition and catharsis

It is entirely illusory to suppose that catharsis can be separated from cognitive processes. Here are some of the ways in which they interact.
  1. Theory framework. A psychodynamic theory that provides a sound rationale for cathartic behaviour is in my view a necessary precursor to initiating it in others. The theory itself can predispose a person to remove repressive and redundant controls. And it provides a secure cognitive framework for descent into the well of emotional discharge. In co-counselling training I always start with a theory and discussion session, and only invite those present to get into the practical work on themselves when they find the theory a sufficiently persuasive basis for doing so. Sound theory provides guidelines for responsible, aware release of distress emotions. And to return periodically to review and refine the concepts that clarify to human understanding the cathartic process, is an important part of sustaining that process in growth-promoting ways.
  2. Theory revision. If catharsis is one of the necessary processes whereby human beings liberate their distress-occluded intelligence, as well as their capacities for love and creative will, then that process surely comes of age when the liberated intelligence reviews the theoretical assumptions in terms of which it has been liberated. The cognitive and the experiential circle round each other, ideally, in mutually enhancing ways. What I call experiential research, and co-operative inquiry (Heron, 1996), involves two or more persons systematically in a three stage process, which may be repeated cyclically several times:
  3. Pre-cathartic open association. Following the chain of spontaneous associations, the thoughts and images that arise unbidden - if there is sufficient attention outside the distress - to start off a working session.
  4. Pre-cathartic intention. A person may start a co-counselling session, for example, with a clear notion of what she wants to work on. The unresolved area of distress has been conceptually identified. This is a kind of directed or focussed pre-cathartic association: the spontaneous associations are invited to arise around an intentional focus. Or, more elaborately, a personal cognitive map of the distorted psyche may be made as a basis for subsequent working: this, in fact, has already been done in broad outline by anyone who accepts the theory framework in 1. above.
  5. Pre-cathartic disidentification. This means disidentifying from distress recordings with their restricted deficiency view of the self and the world: generating a focus of attention outside the distress as a necessary prelude to discharging it. This means a cognitive shift: talking about positive experiences outside the distress; reconstruing the distress experience in a comprehensive way in order to contradict the restrictive concepts in which it is bound.
  6. Pre-cathartic cognitive reversal. This is closely related to the previous method. It is a way of defining the cognitive shift made in disidentification from distress: a person reverses her perspective on the distress-experience instead of seeing it compulsively in the deficiency concepts in which it is bound, she chooses to construe it  from  a wider more inclusive and abundant perspective.
  7. Cathartic insight. The discharge process itself may be launched by the sudden identification within one's being of the buried voice of pain or frozen need.
  8. Post-cathartic insight. The spontaneous flow of dynamic insight following catharsis, as described in previous sections.
  9. Disidentification and cognitive reversals in daily life. Already alluded to above (C. The effects of catharsis 3). When old distress-distorted behaviour tendencies have lost some of their distorting charge through emotional discharge, then the person can effectively disidentify from them when they are provoked by the old stimuli, and reconstrue the provoking situation in abundance rather than deficiency terms. See my account of the reversal cycle in Feeling and Personhood (Heron, 1992, 214-215). A classic reversal in terms of the theory presented in this work would be to replace seeing and responding to difficult people as nasty and unpleasant, by seeing them and responding to them as potentially abundant humans trapped by their buried pain in distorted behaviour: the former construct generates a limited, limiting and inflexible repertoire of response, whereas the latter construct can generate a wide range of flexible alternative behaviours - based on the crucial distinction between the person and the distortion.
A central theoretical question is whether it is possible effectively to resolve distorted behaviour by cognitive means alone, by first of all understanding the dynamic of distorted behaviour, and then by defusing in daily life and in contemplation distorted attitudes and tendencies as they arise. Such defusing would mean seeing the attitudes and tendencies for what they are, and dismantling their energy by removing the cognitive distortions built into them. This involves both witnessing the dynamic contents of consciousness and reconstruing them in the light of some general psychodynamic theory. The resolution of this question is for experiential research. My belief is that both the capacity to witness and to reconstruct can be greatly aided by the discharge process.

F. Transmutation and catharsis

What I have referred to just above as disidentification and cognitive reversals in daily life is a basic kind of transmutation, made possible by previous catharsis, but not itself involving further catharsis. The distorted behaviour tendency still has an energy charge within it, but this charge is transmuted into constructive responses that follow from reconstruing the situation. How we appraise a situation, how we see it, largely determines our emotional and behavioural response to it. Congealed distress compels us to see situations in deficiency terms - as situations that limit, deprive, oppress, restrict - and so we respond as victims. After some measure of cathartic competence is attained, a person can start to choose to see situations in abundance terms, - as situations that provide new opportunities - and so respond creatively and intentionally.

From this point on emotional and behavioural  transmutation becomes a complement to the cathartic process. If transmutation is used exclusively without catharsis, there is some danger, in my view, of the process becoming too cool and dissociated, with repressive distortions creeping in under the guise of transcendental attitudes and aspirations. Or human warmth, the capacity for open, spontaneous, reciprocal loving may diminish or never appear. If catharsis is used exclusively and the person waits to clear the pools of distress before restructuring behaviour, then emotional release becomes too much an end in itself, and, I believe, a deluded one, leaving the person a growth victim.

Where the two processes are used to complement each other, then rechannelling can take over what catharsis started off: the person is liberated from the crude hydraulic model of emptying all the pools of distress. But this complementarity principle needs to be applied with great awareness, to avoid denial of or premature closure on distress material. When the balance is right, release of distress energy aids redirection of distress energy into authentic behaviour, and vice versa - with a total reduction in the amount of each in favour of spontaneously creative behaviour. Or such, at any rate, is my working hypothesis.

Transpersonal techniques are types of transmutation and their discussion above (D. Processes that complement catharsis 3) relates closely to this section. The same applies to artistic activity (D. Processes that complement catharsis 5). For a more comprehensive account of this section see Chapter 8: Catharsis and transmutation, in Helping the Client (Heron., 1990)

G. Catharsis, external displacement and dramatisation

By external displacement I mean the unaware acting out - against other people or the environment - of repressed distress and of a frozen, interrupted human need. The resultant distorted behaviour  has conventional and socially tolerated forms, and socially disruptive forms such as hysterical shouting, uncontrolled verbal aggression, physical assault on persons or property, physical self-destruction. The point has already been made above (A. Catharsis as such 3)  that behaviour of this sort is not catharsis, but a displacement and evasion of the pain of the denied feelings. However, some people who are acting out in these ways may be nearer genuine cathartic release than those whose distorted behaviour is of a severely controlled, withdrawn and repressive kind. So it is possible to train them, if the trainer's interventions are sufficiently authoritative, to flip from external displacement into genuine discharge of a potent but harmless kind.

Thus persons acting out destructively in, for example, a therapeutic community, are re-enacting in an exaggerated and symbolic form the psychological and/or physical violence done to them, in their early lives. Given the setting, the possibility for a genuine fear and anger discharge is not, in principle, far away. Persons who act out in this way, are not simply a danger, a threat and a nuisance, but are ripe for interventions of the skilled cathartic counsellor. An enlightened psychiatrist in a psychiatric unit for disturbed adolescents, north of London in the UK, found that such destructive behaviour significantly reduced after residents acquired intentional cathartic skills.

External displacement in everyday life needs sooner or later to be interrupted, in order to enable the person concerned to accept, experience and get some insight into the psychological pain that is being avoided by and displaced into the distorted behaviour. The ulterior transactions or games analysed in transactional analysis are good examples of the kind of the widespread displacements that occur in conventional social life.

Unresolved distress in children is rapidly displaced into distorted behaviour: they transfer their pain into compulsive clinging, demanding, destructive behaviour, spitefulness and malice, stubborn refusal, and in many other ways. The skilled parent finds some supportive way of interrupting the distorted behaviour, not just to put an end to it, but in order to facilitate discharge of the emotional pain which underlies it.

By dramatisation I mean a form of pseudo-catharsis. It often occurs in the early days when a client in co-ounselling is building up skills in self-directed cathartic release. Thus a client, within the limits of her session, may yell or scream or shout or bang the cushion with a low frequency thud, but in a way that lacks the high frequency spontaneous fiery discharge of genuine anger. She is really dramatising the external oppressor's end of her distress recording - symbolically re-enacting the violence done to her - as a prelude to discharging the fear, grief and the anger trapped at her own end, the victim's end of the recording. After the screaming, the inexperienced client, with the deft intervention of a skilled counsellor, may be able to tolerate and release a genuine discharge. Thus loud and pseudo-angry dramatisations in the client can be an effective prelude to the true release of fear, grief and genuine anger.

H. Catharsis and internal displacement

External displacement is the socially evident distortion of behaviour by repressed pain. The correlate of this acting out is internal displacement, a chronic "acting in" against oneself that takes the form of repressive control. The child can receive a double or treble invalidation: As a condition of social survival, the child learns to internalise these invalidations. The resultant repressive programmes within  the psyche become functionally independent of their external sources. This is the control pattern: an ingrained, chronic attitude of self-deprecation. It continually says "I'm no good, my basic human impulses are no good, my distress emotions are no good, my behaviour is no good: I should be something other than I am". It is a burden of redundant or false guilt and shame, which serves to sustain repression of the distress emotions and the underlying positive potential.

To attain cathartic competence, a person needs to disidentify from this very negative self-image, and see it for what it is - an imposed programme that represses distress and occludes true capacities for creativity and joy. Many people identify very strongly and unawarely with the imposed negative self-image, so that they totally confuse their own identity with it. The process of disidentification, accompanied by bursts of emotional discharge, can seem very unfamiliar, uncomfortable and alarmingly liberating. In the early stages of co-counselling a person may, with much support and encouragement, step out of the control pattern for a brief experience of the unfamiliar liberation, only to be seen a moment later scurrying back into the familiar confines of the straightjacket. In the later stages, the person acquires increasing confidence in stepping out of the control pattern for longer periods, with the result of sustained discharge in a co-counselling session, and creative, joyful behaviour in everyday life.

Chapter 3: Catharsis and human interaction

A. The management of catharsis

There is a mistaken assumption in our society that cathartic release in the client should be under the direction of the "therapist". This strategy has only a restricted though important application. There are other strategies of much wider educational relevance.
  1. One-way direction by another. The counsellor initiates, directs and manages the client's cathartic release. Technical competence lies almost exclusively with the practitioner. This is the traditional model of psychotherapy. It is relevant in my view only to those who have chronically disabling degrees of distress such that they cannot initially take charge of the process themselves, or engage effectively in some form of co-counselling.
  2. Two-way direction by each other. Two trained people work on a reciprocal basis and take it in turns to direct and facilitate the discharge process in each other. This is equivalent to non-permissive counselling, the "intensive contract", in co-counselling. This is particularly valuable at a later stage for trained co-counsellors, when the client's deep-seated systematic evasions and defences are to be interrupted and broached. The counsellor supportively but persistently encourages the client to "hold a direction" against chronic distress, where the client tends to ease away from it, and avoid it.
  3. Two-way self-direction. Two trained co-counsellors work on a reciprocal basis, each taking a turn as both counsellor and client. The client is fundamentally self-directed applying cathartic techniques to herself, with the sustained, supportive aware attention of the counsellor. Technical competence is in the hands of the client and applied by the client to herself. This is the "free attention" or "attention only" contract in co-counselling.
  4. Solitary self-direction. A trained co-counsellor works alone, using her skills to elicit her own cathartic release. She may use a mirror, thus combining client and counsellor roles simultaneously.
  5. Combinations. The above four types of management can be combined in all kinds of ways, sequentially and concurrently. Two important sequences are:

B. Techniques of catharsis

It is not my purpose here to give detailed account of cathartic techniques. A survey of the range of cathartic interventions is given in Co-Counselling Manual. John Heron, 3rd revised edition 1998  and in  Helping the Client (Heron, 1990). I will indicate here four basic categories of technique. See also my Intensive Counselling.
  1. Witnessing cathartic release in others. There is a powerful phenomenon of triggering in cathartic groups. One person attains cathartic release together with the disclosure of past drama and trauma, assisted by the group facilitator in front of the rest of the group. The revealed drama together with strong emotional discharge will often precipitate the discharge of related material in other persons in the group. This is simply catharsis induced in the audience of a drama: here the drama is that of the client working out past hurts from her real life; those who identify most strongly because of similar incidents in their own past lives will tend toward their own discharge. This route to catharsis I call external ideational. The imagination of the audience is fired by a story line with a strong emotional charge, and the emotions of the audience respond accordingly.
  2. Internal ideation. The client works with spontaneously generated associations ideas and memories, using a simple array of techniques to follow the associations through to a point at which emotional discharge of distress emotions is available. The techniques include: All the while the client is picking up the sudden thoughts and memories precipitated into consciousness by any of these simple techniques. By using these methods to generate discharge from the first available distress material, from the tension that is "on top", such discharge leads to the spontaneous emergence of further material, and so on, until the client settles down to the main working area for the session. A review of this approach is given in my Co-Counselling Manual (Heron J, 1998). This approach may, of course, be under the control either of the client as in permissive co-counselling, or under the control of the counsellor as in non-permissive co-counselling.
  3. External mobilisation of body energy. This is the external somatic approach, in which the therapist or counsellor or helper makes direct contact with the body of the client in order to release physical tension and restriction of energy as a means of precipitating emotional discharge. Such contact may involve: And so on. All these physical contacts may be supplemented by verbal instructions to the client to do this or that with bodily movement or breathing or vocalisation, and to disclose and discharge any emotional distress material that is made available by the physical procedures. The work of Reich, of L.E. Eeman, and of other body therapists, has by now well established the power of body methods in precipitating powerful discharge of early infantile distress, and in loosening up memories that may be worked on by methods of internal ideation.
  4. Self-directed mobilisation of body energy. The client engages in a variety of vigorous bodily movements and breathing rhythms and vocalisations, on a purely voluntary and self-directed basis, as in bio-energetics, without any external physical interventions, in order to precipitate emotional discharge or loosen up memories for working on by other methods.
  5. Combinations. The above may all be combined in a variety of sequences. And they are all compatible with the client being self-directed (as in permissive co-counselling): this applies to the external somatic approach also, so long as the client decides when, where, in what manner and for how long the counsellor applies physical contact. In short, all these four methods can be used separately or in various sequences by any of the four different ways of managing catharsis mentioned above (A. The Management of Catharsis). Even in solitary self-direction, a person can use externally applied physical pressure on herself, although of course this can only be done to a limited degree. See also the comment on physiological correlates of distress (Chapter 7, B. Disabling personal distress in the child 5). All the above methods go for emotional discharge intentionally. Complementary to all of them, and perhaps more important and basic than any of them is:
  6. Building the human centre. This is the process of decathexis, of disidentification from distress and discharge, in order to affirm, actualise and celebrate the capacities of the authentic human. This process is undertaken for its own sake, as an end in itself: the affirmation and creation of the values of the self-determining human being in a relation of mutual aid with other self-determining humans. Its secondary and incidental effect is that by taking attention away from distress without repressing it, it makes such distress more available for discharge at other times, see: Balance of attention (Chapter 2, B. Components of cathartic release 1). Methods of building the human centre have been mentioned in several of the preceding sections of this chapter. They include:

C. Catharsis and community

A cathartic society would, in my view, represent a very mature phase in human development. Its members would be sophisticated humans in the best sense, combining four skills. They would be able to:
  1. Control all kinds of emotions when appropriate.
  2. Express positive emotions when appropriate.
  3. Discharge distress emotions when appropriate.
  4. Transmute distress emotions when appropriate.
Some features of such a society may be:
  1. From the earliest years children are encouraged to take charge of their emotions: their human capacities are given unqualified validation, support and facilitation; their distorted behaviour patterns are interrupted, but in a supportive way; their need for catharsis is fully accepted and supported with skilled interventions, while they are also trained to manage the process themselves and to accept and support it in others - with a due sense of appropriate time and place. And this applies in the school as much as in the home.
  2. Where people start to take charge of their emotions, can distinguish between compulsive distorted behaviour (in its many subtle guises) and intentional human behaviour, and can understand their distresses and discharge them, then they also start to take charge of their lives, to be responsibly self-determining. Authoritarian social structures become irrelevant and intolerable. The leader moves in the direction of facilitator of decision-making in a community of peers. In organisational processes, there is greater emphasis on delegation, open communication, genuine consultation, participation in decision-making, and consensus.
  3. The educational process abandons the exclusive pre-eminence given to intellectual and technical competence, finds ways of giving space for the acquisition of emotional and interpersonal competence, and facilitates self-assessment and self-direction as central to learning. The process of learning - in its intellectual, affective and elective domains, relating self and peers - is as important if not more important than the product. Education and community action and involvement are more closely interwoven. Affective education replaces old-style psychotherapy.
  4. The helping professions start to deprofessionalise themselves in the sense that their function becomes increasingly that of training a whole range of peer self-help groups in the community, from co-counselling to mutual technical and social aid of various kinds.
  5. The dramatisation of distress through ideological stereotyping and scapegoating of political and economic opponents is seen for what it is, so that increasingly rational roles and values can overlap in the same person: thus the same person, through social re-organisation, may combine in different ways at different times and with different weightings, the roles of worker, manager, owner; or with respect to different political issues the values of the radical and of the conservative.
  6. Nuclear families dissolve more into communal interaction. Neighbourhoods become dynamic communities involved in social, aesthetic and political action.
  7. Gender rigidities are dissolved, so that men are liberated from the straightjacket of the masculine stereotype, and women from the feminine stereotype - with much greater reciprocity and equivalence of role and function.
  8. Sex-positive attitudes abound. With the weight of repression lifted, sex is seen for what it is, the imaginative and loving celebration of human life, its only regulative norm being the minimisation of personal distress and the maximisation of human flourishing.
In general, those who on a basis of reciprocal support accept catharsis as a necessary (though not sufficient) means of liberating their distress-occluded potential, will also need to find new ways of living, working and creating together in community, new forms of social and political action - in order to give that potential adequate expression.

Two distortions can occur.

  1. A person may turn to personal growth as a way of avoiding the issues of social, political and economic change: we then have a warm, loving, open, authentic person, who is in some way parasitic on a repressive social system which she is in no way committed to change. She gives no thought to the big structures, to the issues involved in changing them, or to plans to change any social structures big or small.
  2. On the other hand, a person may turn to political radicalism in part as a defence against dealing with repressed distress emotions: in this case revolutionary fervour may to a significant degree be the acting out of denied emotions, the chronic fears and angers of childhood interference. When such a revolutionary comes to power, we may expect to see the repression acted out in the classic form of an oppressive dictatorship on behalf of the masses.
The complementary poles of personal growth and social change both need independent attention: neither one can be a substitute for the other, nor, I believe, does either one have any necessary precedence over the other - rather they are correlative and mutually supporting activities.

The discharge of anger is sometimes objected to by social radicals on the grounds that it defuses social action, takes the mainspring out of its motivation. I believe this is a delusion. The problem for most people is to get in touch with the anger that is denied by the repressive social system of which they are a part. To start to discharge such anger is, in my view, to start a momentum toward effective social action. Once the discharge process begins and some insight into the repressive social structure is gained, then the person can start intentionally to re-channel some of the energy into relevant action. If there is no catharsis at all, there is the much more real danger that repressed anger from many sources, personal and social, if it does not lead to depressive alienation from all social effort, may lead to compulsive social action that is ill-judged, misplaced and relatively ineffective, or simply destructive.

D. Catharsis and orgasm

Reich thought that the repression of sexual emotions lay at the root of rigid, inhuman and oppressive social systems. This is too exclusively a somatic approach and is only part of the story in my view: it is the whole range of distinctively human capacities as such that are occluded by distress, and the resultant distortion includes a distortion of the sexual function. I would like to suggest here both an authentic sex-negative theory (as against old style and repressive sex-negative theories) and a sex-positive theory.
  1. The authentic sex-negative theory The orgasm cycle is quite distinct from the cathartic cycle, in the sense that orgasm as such does not unload fear, anger, grief, embarrassment, from the psychosomatic system, whereas catharsis does. The number of orgasms a person has, appears to have no effect on the reduction of distress-distorted behaviour, whereas I believe that the number of cathartic sessions a person has, does effect such a reduction. An orgasm is occasionally followed in some people by a spontaneous cathartic release of tears, or laughter or trembling; but in most people most of the time I do not think it does. So it cannot be argued that orgasm is a reliable prelude to catharsis. A more general displacement occurs from frustrated nurturance into sexuality. Nurturance I define as the expression and sharing of the human capacity for loving and being loved through the body by touching, holding, embracing, stroking, caressing, where sexual arousal is absent, minimal or entirely secondary and marginal. Human beings of all ages have strong nurturance needs I believe, and they are distinct from sexual needs. Nurturance needs and sexual needs may be fulfilled in relative independence of each other: nurturance without sex, or sex without nurturance. Or the fulfilment of one may lead over into the fulfilment of the other. Or both may be fulfilled simultaneously, as when sex becomes the celebration of tenderness and love. In co-counselling, where sexual attraction arises in the context of what was initially a co-counselling relationship, I always suggest that the attraction is made explicit, is acknowledged and then worked on by cathartic techniques to see whether it is the presenting indication of some unidentified early material. What appears as sexual attraction may resolve into a frozen need for nurturance and tenderness for and from someone earlier in life, into incest fixations, or into other unfinished emotional business. Once these things are dealt with, and their underlying tensions reduced, then the sexual attraction diminishes, and the idea of acting on it becomes irrelevant.

    If the sexual attraction is acted on without intensive counselling on it to find out whether it is distress driven, then the result can be a psychological and interpersonal mess. The sexual relation that results can be a collusive, self-perpetuating avoidance of unidentified distress, which, however, continually distorts the relation emotionally from behind the scenes. The couple thus become compulsively locked, as it were, in a series of emotionally defensive and distorted embraces; and are mystified to know why they cannot relate in a rational, loving and aware way.

    The sexually wise person appears to be one who, in her encounters in life, can distinguish between sexual interest, in herself and in the other, that is rooted in hidden distress; and sexual interest the expression of which is a true celebration of human values.

    There appear to be three different types of sexual encounter:

  2. The sex-positive theory In the realm of authentic human encounter and intimacy, sexual activity is a celebration of many things singly or in any variety of combinations, serial or simultaneous.
In the non-cathartic, repressive society, either by condemnation or pursuit, sex is given a kind of weighting it does not deserve. There is a remorseless, a lack of freedom and lightness, of being at ease, both in the proscription and in the permissiveness. In the emotionally open society, sex may be seen as one of the many delights open to humans, one of many possible ways persons can share and celebrate their human identity - and so it becomes an elegant option, related to a physical need but not bound by it.

The human body can be seen, for consciousness, as five life rhythms, overlapping continuously in time: the heartbeat, breathing, eating and excreting, waking activity and sleeping, sexual arousal and sexual quiescence. The five rhythms increase, from first to last, their time cycle: or, to put it in other words, they decrease their frequency - the heart beats very fast compared to the slow rhythm of waking and sleeping. The five are also, roughly speaking, in an ascending order of flexibility or amenability to voluntary control and variation. Nowadays by biofeedback methods people can learn directly to influence the rate of the heartbeat. But these voluntarily induced variations are small compared to the variations a person can induce in the breathing cycle, which again are small compared to the ways in which a person can choose to alter the times between eating The greatest flexibility attaches to the sexual function: a person can vary enormously the times between its satisfaction, without causing any physical dysfunction. Each of the other four cycles has an outer time limit: to attempt to extend the cycle beyond that limit leads to physical dysfunction or death.

The very great flexibility of the sexual function, combined with its ecstatic, convulsive consummation, has probably produced in human beings throughout history a purely internal anxiety about its management. The primary external constraint has been that of childbirth, apart from venereal disease. Put the internal anxiety and the external constraint together and, with displaced distress of other kinds, we get the genesis of most of the restrictive norms, tabus and shibboleths that have constrained human sexuality in the past.

Today with theories such as those proposed in this work we can understand and resolve the internal anxiety and the displaced distress. Childbirth is now entirely under voluntary control. Venereal disease is eliminable. Perhaps for the first time in history, human beings can claim fully the heritage of the flexible ecstasy of their bodies. In a society where human beings take charge of their emotions, take responsibility for their lives, and act very awarely in relation to others, we may expect that this claim will be taken up in all kinds of sensitive, exciting and imaginative ways.
 

Chapter 4: Human needs and behaviour

This chapter and the remaining chapters present a theory of human nature and the human condition which underpins the discussion of issues in the first three chapters.

A. Physical needs

The human being has needs, related to the structure and processes of the physical organism, for food, drink, sex, sleep, warmth and shelter, activity, sensory stimulation. For all practical purposes, there is virtually no genetic programming of behaviour to meet these needs, apart from minimal reflexes such as a sucking reflex in the neonate. Behaviour that satisfies physical needs is almost entirely learned through the process of socialisation: social norms prescribe the relevant behaviour.

B. Personal needs

These appear to be sui generis, discontinuous with physical needs and not reducible to them in any way, however inter-related the respective satisfactions of human and physical needs may be. By their very nature they would seem to belong to a different order of reality. Their satisfaction cannot be defined in purely physical terms, and any culturally determined and defined limit of their satisfaction begs basic questions: Why suppose that this culture more than any other has arrived at valid defining limits? But in any case can any defining limit rationally be given? Personal needs, on this model, are needs to fulfil, realise distinctively human capacities or potentialities; and the depth, range, variety, form and intensity of such fulfilment is virtually unlimited.
  1. The need to love and be loved. The capacity here is the capacity to care and be cared for, to be concerned for the other for the other's sake and to be the conscious recipient of such concern, to wish the flourishing of another and to flourish in response to a reciprocal wish. The need is satisfied in mutual loving - a shared celebration of individual strengths and differences; and in all those situations in which persons seek co-operatively to provide conditions in which they and others can in liberty determine and fulfil their true needs and interests. It seems logically odd to suppose there can be any final limit to the fulfilment of a person's capacity for loving. If love can be regarded, in part at any rate, as concern for the other qua other, then the only (variable) limit put upon loving would seem to be the number of others known to exist and expected to exist.
  2. The need to understand and be understood. This presupposes the capacity of intelligence - to entertain sets of concepts that render experience intelligible and to be an intelligible experience for others. The need is satisfied in mutual communication - giving and receiving sets of symbols that give meaning to or find meaning in the world/others/self. The symbols may be discursive as in language or non-discursive as in all forms of non-verbal art and non-verbal interaction. Again it is logically odd to argue that there are absolute limits to knowledge, to fulfilment of our capacity for understanding, for we are then faced with a strange assertion that we know there is an unknowable. There appear to be no logically discernible limits to this fulfilment.
  3. The need to be self-directing and to be freely engaged with the directions of a greater whole. This need presupposes the capacity for choice and for being chosen. To be self-directing is to make autonomous choices - choices rationally made on the basis of relevant factual considerations and in the light of values of one's own. It means taking charge of one's life, bringing more and more (and potentially unlimited) areas of it under the direction of explicit intention, of conscious experimentation and risk-taking. The need is satisfied in associations in which individual autonomy is exercised in the context of those with shared beliefs and aspirations who also exercise their autonomy. The person takes responsibility and engages with a social system for significant parts of which others have taken responsibility. She is self-directing while being voluntarily subject to the directions which others have taken on her behalf.
Some general conjectural points may now be made about these supposed three basic personal needs:
  1. The behaviour that satisfies them would seem to be entirely learned. But there are at least three overlapping phases in the learning process:
  2. Each of the three needs was expressed above in both an active and a passive form. It seems reasonable to argue, from considerable evidence now available, that adequate fulfilment of the passive form of the need is a necessary precondition of, or at any rate greatly facilitates, effective fulfilment of the active form of the need. To be loved enables loving, to be understood enables understanding, to be subject to facilitating directions of others enables self-direction. Humans need to receive before they can impart, to be nourished before they can exercise.
  3. The three needs are interdependent and mutually supporting. Effective communication presupposes mutual concern and co-operative exercise of autonomy. Fulfilment of any one presupposes some measure of fulfilment of each of the other two.
  4. As suggested above, they are distinct in kind from physical needs, potentially unlimited in the extent of their fulfilment, and yet the physical organism with its needs is their primary medium.
  5. When dealing with the effects of psychological and social oppression or deprivation, then satisfying personal needs can be seen as meeting a lack, making up a deficit, even healing a psychological wound. But in social circumstances where human beings enable and facilitate each other, satisfying these needs can better be seen as the pursuit of human flourishing, of abundant living, of variety, novelty and challenge. They are concerned with the innovative, not merely the conservative, side of life. And when they subsume and include the satisfactions of physical need, then the latter too take on this quality of flourishing above and beyond purely homeostatic maintenance.
  6. A further suggestion can be tentatively made. These needs seem to seek fulfilment in two polar but complementary modes. On the one hand, there is the tendency to self-expression, to greater distinctness, differentiation and richness of individual being. On the other hand, there is the tendency to self-transcendence, to greater unity, fusion and identity of being. In both the active and passive modes, personal needs, it is conjectured, complement the thrust of diversity with the thrust of unity, and vice versa.
    The basic residual question is whether the full range of human behaviour - from the distorted and perverse to the loving and enlightened - can be explained in terms of relations between the total environment of human beings, the organism and two sets of needs, physical and personal, the behaviour to satisfy which has to be acquired through experience and is not innately programmed in the organism.

C. Human behaviour

The range of behaviour to be explained is something like the following:
  1. Distinctively human behaviour. When personal needs are fulfilled in a relatively unimpaired way, then we have the three phases or types of behaviour indicated earlier: Autonomous behaviour is not other-directed but self-directed and self-creating, with norms and values rationally adopted.
  2. Distorted human behaviour. When personal needs have been interfered with or suspended in some way and their proper fulfilment occluded and suppressed, then behaviour is distorted into half-conscious, quasi-mechanical, repetitive and maladaptive forms. Humans become the confused victims of disrupted psychological processes that play themselves out in behaviour in a relatively unaware and uncontrolled way. The point about distorted behaviour is that it is not deliberately malicious, but is blind, repetitive, unproductive, dissatisfying to the person who is not in charge of it. This is the arena of the defence mechanisms in Freudian analysis, of games and ulterior transactions in transactional analysis, of intermittent and chronic patterns in re-evaluation counselling, of struggle and symbolic behaviour in primal therapy. Distorted behaviour is above all compulsive. It appears to be very widespread throughout the culture. Some common forms are: The general theory here, to be developed more thoroughly below, is that this sort of behaviour both contains (is a defence against the release of), and is distorted by, unresolved and undischarged distress resulting from cumulative early interference with personal needs. The person is only an apparent victim of the compulsions, has some awareness of their counter-productive repetitive nature and has the power, with appropriate training, to release the distress, dissolve the distortions and gain insight into their genesis. There appear to be three degrees of such behaviour:
  3. Perverted human behaviour. This is behaviour that is deliberately malicious, that intentionally seeks the harm of self or others, and seeks that harm primarily for its own sake, as an end in itself, even when rationalised as a means to some spurious good, and even when justified as a means to some genuine good. Such behaviour can include the use of force, threat, torture, duress; giving lies and false information, defaming, slandering; destructive psychological attack; brainwashing and stress-induced change; malicious seduction in the sexual and the wider sense; supporting someone independently bent on destructive behaviour, persistent self-destruction or self-neglect. In some instances perverted behaviour may simply be learned, adopted on the basis of instruction by some supposed authority; in other instances it may have the same genesis as distorted behaviour, only more so; or more probably both explanations apply. However, compared to simple defensive distorted behaviour, there appears to be an additional factor: intentionality has taken over the distortions and vice versa. The chronic internal distress is systematically, deliberately being projected onto others by means of malicious intent. Ordinary run-of-the-mill distorted behaviour produces a psychological mess and creates much dissatisfaction and unhappiness, but it is free of this kind of intentional malignity. It often has pseudo-intentionality: the compulsive behaviour is dressed up with spurious legitimating reasons. Perverted behaviour involves a much more far-reaching distortion of intentionality itself: it wills harm.

    Another way of restating the whole of this section is to say that human behaviour can degenerate according to an inverted Y shape:

    Authentic-intention
    Pseudo-intention
    Malicious-intention Deluded-intention
    There is authentic intention, where personal needs are meaningfully fulfilled; there is pseudo-intention, which rationalises compulsive behaviour rooted in minor distortions of personal needs; then there is either malicious intention or deluded intention, rooted in major distortions of personal needs.
  4. The rigid society. Distorted and perverted behaviour seems to become systematically congealed in social structures, creating the rigid society. Some of its features are:
In many ways such a social system looks like the product of double distress (see following section): distress at the physical level about food, territory, etc., leads to an animal-like dominance hierarchy, but cumulative additional distress at the level of personal needs distorts such a dominance hierarchy into forms of intentional oppression unknown among animals.

Chapter 5: Human vulnerability

A primary relation between the human being and the environment is that of vulnerability. Vulnerability and its sequelae provide a major set of concepts for explaining human behaviour in all its forms. To say that a human is vulnerable is to say that her needs can be frustrated and interfered with, the result being the experience of distress and its associated behaviours.

A. Physical vulnerability

Physical needs can be frustrated by physical privations or traumas leading to acute distress experiences such as hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, the pain of disease or accident or attack, sexual tension. In the animal realm there appear to be something like emotional distress experiences involved with some, at any rate, of the physical ones. Thus there is anger vented in defensive or offensive aggression when the issues concern mating, territory or food. There is fear leading to immobility or flight when under attack, as an alternative to counter-aggression. There is grief in some species exhibited in wailing and mourning when there is separation from parent or offspring or mate. Human beings, it is reasonable to suppose, function in similar ways, with emotional distresses of anger, fear and grief and their behaviours, tied in with physical frustrations.

In animals of the same species, anger with its associated aggressive threat or fight behaviour appears to have adaptive functions: it leads to social cohesion and leadership by maintaining dominance hierarchies; it makes for an effective use of available territory (and food) by separating groups out over it; it benefits progeny by selecting out the best parents; it protects the young. Nor, in natural habitats, is it necessarily highly destructive: the norm is often threat behaviour or token fights rather than serious wounding and killing, although the latter does occur. Intra-specific aggression among animals seems more harnessed to the preservation of life than to its destruction.

Among monkeys and apes, intra-specific aggression is stronger in baboons, weaker in gorillas and chimpanzees, but in the wild it is almost entirely reduced to threat displays with very little overt fighting. In unusual environmental circumstances however, as in captivity where there may be crowding and/or sudden disturbances, unfamiliar irritations, then all these species can be violently aggressive to their own kind.

We do not know the sort of aggression that occurred among early hominids, but it does seem reasonable to suppose that the human organism, physically comparable as it is to the primates, has tendencies toward the adaptive aggression shown among primates and, when under physical duress such as overcrowding, to the more violently destructive aggression also