Ways of knowing: Crago and Devereaux

Crago, H. (2012). "A tale of two hemispheres: Psychotherapy, psychology and the divided brain." Psychotherapy in Australia 18(4): pp. 58-65.

Devereaux, L. (2008). Between you and me: Reaching for understanding in anthropology and analysis. The uses of subjective experience: A weekend of conversations between ANZSJA analysts and academics who work with Jung's ideas. Melbourne, Australia, Australian & New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts: pp. 45-73.

When my counsellor gave me an article to read, I did not realise (and, presumably, neither did she), that she was handing me at last the answer to the powerful question of why I failed to complete my PhD. The article, by Hugh Crago, uses as its inspiration Ian McGilchrist’s The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. It argues for the importance of the left and right hemispheres of the brain working in conjunction with each other, and describes the dangers of one hemisphere dominating over the other. Crago’s subject is psychotherapy, but his depiction of the current dominance of left-brain thinking in our culture, and of the marginalisation of right-brain thinkers, speaks to a wider context.

With amused and guilty delight I read the following:

Because words are separate from, and only 'represent' the real-world things to which they refer, the left hemisphere can spin off easily into a self-referential universe, and delude itself that this 'world', created by itself, is the only 'reality'. p. 61

I started to read on, then stopped. Surely what I was reading was a perfect description of post modernism? I had been here. I had lived it for four years, through a Masters degree and the beginnings of a PhD. I recognised this beast! Sure enough, on the very next page:

[McGilchrist] points out repeatedly that, on its own, the left hemisphere veers off in a deeply worrying direction, building systems of thought (and practice) that claim universal validity, but are increasingly out of touch with the reality of human beings and the world in which they live. For McGilchrist, both Modernism and Postmodernism (with obvious exceptions, such as Picasso), are examples. p. 62

After my training in critical thinking, such a statement sounds blissfully like blasphemy. I was thrown back into a world I struggled to comprehend; a world full of wonder, insight and possibility, and yet strangely unsatisfying. It was like an abstract concept, lacking form and substance. It needed context. The more I studied, the more fascinated and yet empty I managed to feel, and the more frustrated. I began to read from other critical perspectives, looking for a more complete picture, and failing to find it. I would find it in individuals, such as David Rudd, but not in any particular discipline or school of thought. And I could not work out what made the difference, for me, between a David Rudd, and a brilliant post modern thinker.

Now I suspect I have my answer. What I could intuit, but not describe, was that the wonderful work I was reading was, for me, lacking context - lacking body. And ironically, I discover, my former analyst, Leslie Devereaux, has also written on the same topic, but only now do I make the connection:

what a relief it was to find a philosophical attitude to knowing that grounded itself in experience, and investigated its conditions! - that took advantage of Kant's realisation that however wondrous human conscious is, and it is, it is nonetheless housed in bodies and sense organs and an embodied mind that gives it access to the world. No body: no mind. No embodied mind: no knowing. How humiliating is that to the project of limitless rationality hoping to become God?. p. 46

She writes of the strange disconnect between the lived experience and the ways in which we try to apprehend that experience:

Anthropology, as well as analysis, knows that people do not actually live in the conceptual, but in the daily, the totally contingent. But we think, we assess and we evaluate ourselves against the conceptual. p. 47

and

Literacy is a process whereby the thinker becomes aware of his own thoughts as an entity, as an abstraction. Writing fixes the idea, transforming the evanescent world of sound to the quiescent, semi-permanent world of space. It allows analysis to free itself from context and to develop generalising and universalising tendencies. And print, far more than mere writing, completes the separation of the knower from the known. Printed text creates finality and closure, and presents thought as a commodity in the manufacture and discursive shaping of the text, and in conventions of form. Thus the lifeworld has lost its place in the academy to analytical abstraction.  p. 57

Here at last I have my answer. Post modern thinking gave me tools with which to open and explore the universe. It then left me there, with no instruction, indeed no permission, to do anything with what I found. What I instinctively felt the need of, was to complete the circle, as described by Crago:

Key to McGilchrist's concept is that while the right hemisphere can take in new information direct from the surrounding world, and then pass it on to the left hemisphere, the left can only process what it already knows. p. 62