"Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex things we don't – and, most importantly, can't – know."
This was part of a review for Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “The Black Swan” and bears mentioning here.
Let's position affectology and its clinical forms within the larger socio-professional context in the world.
Affectology presents quite a few direct and somewhat jarring challenges and points of view that have never been considered by the broader spectrum of public and psychotherapeutic professionals. In order to get the frame of reference “right,” let's look at a significant reason as to why this should be so.
THE BLACK SWAN
This is an argument from the world of pure mathematics and philosophy that offers that the difficulty that many of the public and indeed many of the medical and psychological community has with acknowledging and recognizing the importance of a COMPULSORY ABSENCE OF TALK in clinical forms of affectology is because of its parallel with BLACK SWAN THEORY. In fact, affectology could very well present itself as the perfect example of this theory.
The term black swan comes from the pre-18th century Western conception that 'All swans are white.' In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 18th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass.
So, in this metaphor, the last century and a half of the development of psychological thought, theory and practice has been full of white swans. Those swans represented ‘narrative.’ But because the world of psychology was full of white swans, that did not mean that black swans did not exist – and in affectology's case, the black swans represented this whole world of 'the non-narrative affect self'; the fact that we human beings house a significant aspect of ourselves that cannot be communicated with, either outside ourselves, and more significantly, within ourselves as “self-knowingness.”
But, as in Taleb’s proposition, most of the world only accepted white swans and continued (even after the discovery of black swans) to relate the word “swan” with “white.” In psychological terms, professionals and the public alike continue to equate “psychotherapy” with “talk” – “narrative.” The black swans of biological nature did indeed exist in spite of the world’s non-acceptance, and in affectology's case, this 'hidden' affect matrix of affective neuroscience exists in spite of any insistence that psychotherapy naturally requires narrative.
Taleb also goes on to postulate something he calls the “Lucid Fallacy,” and it bears mention here.
“….We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage bullshit, the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Francaise, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.
Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters — we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial — and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort….” |
So herein lies a problem for affectology. Following the findings and posits of the world of affective neuroscience, we have no problem with understanding all the totemic issues of Affectology – the existence of “the silent self” the “non-narrative affect matrix,” the “perennial perseveration of affect reactions into later life” – and the detailed rest. To affectologists, these are like sitting on the banks of the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia, the original and only habitat of the black swan, and admiring the beauty of that bird; lamenting, perhaps that the rest of the world only see white swans and are missing something beautiful in their experience.
The message here is that the insistence on narrative has been around so long in the texts and understanding of psychology (theory and practice) that this “new view” that we affectologists hold will take time for the color to change from the white narrative to the black realization of something within the human psyche that can not be “told” or put into language. In spite of holding up a real black swan in front of people, many will be habituated to still say that “all swans are white!” In other words, we cannot expect everyone to readily accept the new finding – particularly those who make their living from white swans.
So, we could change the wording of Taleb’s black swan theory to an affectological view that would still hold water…….
The message here is that the insistence on narrative has been around so long in the texts and understanding of psychology (theory and practice) that this “new view” that we affectologists hold will take time for the color to change from the white narrative to the black realization of something within the human psyche that can not be “told” or put into language. In spite of holding up a real black swan in front of people, many will be habituated to still say that “all swans are white!” In other words, we cannot expect everyone to readily accept the new finding – particularly those who make their living from white swans.
So, we could change the wording of Taleb’s black swan theory to an affectological view that would still hold water…….
The term black swan of narrative comes from the traditional psychotherapeutic conception that 'All psychotherapy involves mutual cross-narrative' - talk. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist; – existence without narrative. The 21st Century discovery of clinical affectology in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass.
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