parlêtre

Thoughts on the Purification Model in TMI

with 5 comments

Before I go further, I have decided to spend a bit of time reflecting on the notion of purification, which is central to the meditative theory and practice outlined in The Mind Illuminated. (Of course, the notion does not originate with this book, for it has a long history in meditative traditions.) Here is an example of how this idea is deployed in the text itself:

“for sub-minds to unify, conflicting goals and priorities must first be resolved. Since conflict resolution and integration can only occur in consciousness, the effect of this pressure from below was to force the buried content preventing unification up into consciousness to be purified… exclusive focus and pacification of mind … created the perfect opportunity for both deeply buried and extremely subtle material to surface.” (p. 283-284).

The idea is that material that is unconscious is forced into consciousness where it can be experienced. In this way, the meditator is “purified” – released from – the influence of this unconscious material. As someone who worked with the material in TMI, I can attest to the power of the experiences that are being described here. My objection is to the language used to describe these experiences. What do we mean, exactly, when we speak of purification?

Grunberger (1984), a French psychoanalyst, describes purity as a narcissistic ideal that involves seeking to attain a state of perfection through denial of the physical instincts and of corporeality itself. It is, in his words, an “absolute and autonomous narcissistic ideal … from which the instinctual dimension has been completely eliminated” (p. 114). It is “stripped of every physical element” (p. 116). In traditional psychoanalytic terms, central to corporeality are the sexual and aggressive instincts. Purity, in its very essence, repudiates these in an attempt to transcend them, to actualize an autonomous existence, to repudiate dependency. This is a “narcissistic ideal” – that is, a sought-after sense of self – that seems deeply relevant to the recent events that have occurred in the Dharma Treasure community.

Are there better ways to talk about what is happening in so-called purification experiences? I believe that there are. That is what I will elaborate in the remainder of this post.

Fundamental to the human organism is affect. Freud (1916-1917) described affects as composite experiences that include “particular motor innervations or discharges” and “certain feelings” (p. 395). Since then, emotion has been defined as the neurophysiological and motor-expressive component and feelings as the subjective, cognitive-experiential component of affect, a more general term encompassing both (Nemiah, Freyberger, & Sifneos, 1967). For emotions to be represented mentally and experienced as feelings requires an intact underlying process: the psychic elaboration of emotion (Nemiah, 1977). The psychic elaboration of emotion relies upon symbolic functioning: the creation and manipulation of symbols in the form of images and language. It is these that allow us to re-present ourselves to ourselves.

When we think about the “depth” dimension of the mind, we are thinking about affect. The neuroscientist Damasio (1994, 1999) has written eloquently about how thought and affect are not antithetical; on the contrary, affect informs reason rather than disturbing reason. LeDoux (1994, 1996) has written about how we “begin to respond to the emotional significance of a stimulus before we fully represent the stimulus” (1994, p. 221). This should give pause to any notion that mindfulness – which relies on being able to represent affect in consciousness – can serve as a guard against problematic behavior motivated by affect.

A process of mentalization has been proposed to describe a preconscious linking function that connects bodily excitations with psychic representations (Lecours & Bouchard, 1997). It is, fundamentally, a process of transformation through which bodily excitations, whether somatic, motoric, or intersubjective, undergo a qualitative transformation into mental contents within a human interpersonal and intersubjective matrix (Dunn, 1995). The theory of mentalization discussed here (Lecours & Bouchard, 1997) allows us to describe the relative presence or absence of the capacity that results from this process as it manifests at a given point in time. The notion of mentalization was originally proposed by French psychoanalysts in an effort to understand psychosomatic patients. At that time, it implied a binary view — either experience is mentalized or not — and neglected the fact that psychic contents exist on a continuum of increasing mental quality (Lecours & Bouchard, ibid).

The four registers of emotional expression are somatic, motoric, imaginal, and verbal. In the somatic register, affect is expressed viscerally through internal physiological sensations, functional disturbances, and somatic lesions. In an infant, affect is first experienced as bodily excitation (e.g., pain, tension, or nausea) in the internal organs, head, musculature, and skin. Yet throughout development, the body remains our ultimate emotional backdrop, the place in which experience we cannot know with our minds continues to make its mark. Motor activity involves the behavior and action of the muscular body, including positive and negative manifestations (i.e., twitches and pacing and but also silences, stillness). The infant squirms, wiggles, cries, and smiles — all are reflexive enactments of a felt somatic state. Yet adults equally make use of activity as a proxy for understanding and verbalizing affect.

The imaginal, a pivotal step in the chain that bridges body and mind, involves mental imagery: mental pictures and scenes as representations of underlying bodily states. Its content takes the form of images as expressed in dreams, fantasies, and metaphors. It is a pivotal step, for it is the first register that moves from experience of a thing in itself to a representation of that thing, which can then be elaborated further through symbolization. The verbal, finally, entails the manifestation of affect in language, in words and stories, explanations and insights.. It is the pinnacle of our emotional architecture, allowing us to link past and present, to hold up an experience and to examine it from different angles, to put our emotions “on pause,” and to bridge, even if only partially, the gaps that separate us as individuals (Quatman, 2015).

Any emotional estate is likely to incorporate aspects that we can symbolize and those that we cannot (i.e., that exceed language). Emotions are probably never without some degree of symbolization, insofar as we always make meaning of our experience. Yet affect also, inevitably, is “outside language” (Green, 1999, p. 48) to some degree, in spite of the fact that it continues to have an impact on us and those around us. It’s all a matter of degree. This, to my mind, captures why our understanding of the world and ourselves is always incomplete.

Returning to the topic at hand, consider the “hysterical” female patient of nineteenth century Vienna, who we would today think of as having a conversion disorder. In somewhat caricatured form, she presents with a glove paralysis – that is, her right hand can’t move – and the physician “discovers” that her hand is paralyzed because she has the impulse to masturbate, which is at odds with her sense of what is right and appropriate for a lady of her station. Because she can’t “think the thought” that her desire for sexual gratification is in conflict with her moral beliefs – a process of psychic elaboration that would allow her to truly grapple with this dilemma – the conflict expresses itself through the somatic channel.

These days, we don’t see patients like this very much for a number of reasons, but the basic phenomena is familiar. Last week someone came to my office with severe hand pain that had persisted for several months. She had divorced only two months ago, it turned out, and was enraged with her ex-husband, though she didn’t want to think of herself as an angry person. When we articulated her desire to strangle and punch her past love, the pain disappeared entirely. The affect of rage could only find expression through the somatic channel. When other channels became available – in particular, the imaginal and verbal channels, which facilitated the re-presentation of the affect – her symptom disappeared entirely.

Purification experiences are a direct result of blocking channels of affective expression. When we meditate, we typically resolve to remain relatively still. This blocks, to a large extent, the motoric channel of expression. In a concentration practice, like the one outlined in TMI, we engage in a generative practice (see Jason Siff’s theory of meditative processes) that, to a large extent, forecloses the verbal and imagistic channel, insofar as our intention is to attend solely to the object of concentration. This leaves the somatic as the sole channel though which affect can be expressed, which accounts for the strange physical experiences that characterize the purification process. Now, purification processes are more complicated than this: by remaining still and attending to our breathing, we block the motoric channel and restrict the verbal channel. The imaginal channel may remain relatively more open, however, which accounts for the strange visual phenomena that may emerge. The possibilities are vast.

This process can be deeply productive. In our day-to-day lives, we do all sorts of things to avoid experiencing disturbing and destabilizing affects, whether thinking compulsively, fidgeting and engaging in other repetitive motoric actions, daydreaming about narcissistic gratifications related to sex, power, etc., and many others. Meditative practice interrupts many of these largely unconscious dissociative mechanisms, forcing us to confront aspects of ourselves that have been avoided in the past. At the same time, many meditative instructions – particularly those that privilege generative processes and discourage thinking (i.e., the verbal channel) – prevent the full psychic elaboration of our affective states. I will discuss this issue further in a future blog post but, in short, I believe it is the central problem with most modern meditation theories and techniques, insofar as they are applied in a modern context.

I would suggest that the narrative of purification binds us to a problematic way of thinking about how our emotional lives are intertwined with the practice of meditation. Jonathan Haidt et al., in their book The Righteous Mind, articulate a Five Foundations Theory of morality. One of these foundations is purity – an abhorrence of disgusting things – and I have suggested, following Gruberger (1984), that purity is essentially a narcissistic preoccupation. Given that the avowed goal of meditation is internal development, perhaps we would be better served by jettisoning the language of purity and impurity entirely and discussing these phenomena in the terms that I have laid out in this short essay: as ways of encountering our affective lives that have previously been avoided.

Written by parletre

August 25, 2019 at 3:49 am

Posted in Uncategorized

5 Responses

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  1. I don’t know about TMI, but in the Vedantic model, and probably the Buddhist model, too, purity of mind is really about a quietness that allows for a profound and prolonged concentration. Thoughts that are perceived as “alien” or “disturbances” are few.

    Akilesh Ayyar

    August 25, 2019 at 4:07 am

  2. Intrigued to see where you will go next with this.

    The purity/impurity duality is explicitly rejected in Vajrayana Buddhism. “Impurity” and disgust are accepted, or even provoked, and worked with directly, as I wrote here: https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/disgust-as-buddhist-practice

    Rin’dzin Pamo has also written about the dangers of viewing meditation as purification specifically in the context of *The Mind Illuminated*, also contrasting this with the Vajrayana approach: https://vajrayananow.com/2019/07/05/the-mind-illuminated-a-journal-purity-and-impurity/

    States of equanimity and mental quiet are taken as a starting point, not a goal, in Vajrayana. Thoughts, emotions, and other mental contents are generally “left alone” to do their thing as they will, not suppressed or avoided. In “wrathful practice,” intense emotions are deliberately courted, in order to transform them.

    Visionary experiences, charged with intense, specific meanings (not merely weird sensory distortions) are common and accepted in Vajrayana practice. These seem to me (and many others) to function rather like depth psychology in Western practice.

    It’s worth noting that numerous such visionary experiences are also recounted in detail by the founders of modern Theravada meditation systems, who regarded them as critically important. This seems to have been suppressed in their translation into the West.

    David Chapman

    August 25, 2019 at 5:47 am

  3. What about the aspect during the ‘purification process’ to learn to ‘be with’ unpleasant sensations/emotions? Maybe this is not a key method of the Mind Illuminated which I haven’t read. But my experience from having practiced in the Western Insight meditation framework was that a lot of learning is about how to experience parts of yourself ‘coming up’ and relate to them without trying to push them away. Examples of teachers of this would be Sharon Salzberg or Chris Germer (for a non-Buddhist adaptation) with their practices around loving kindness and self-compassion. And my impression was that this is an important complement to insight meditation and it would not generally be recommended to just do insight meditation? So, some of the benefit of the ‘purification’ would then be allowing these parts of oneself that one normally ignores to be there and befriending them. I have no experience with the Jungian approach. Is that related?

    That being said, in my practice I have found (through Rob Burbea’s work on ‘the Imaginal’) that there is something to be said for allowing the ‘content’ to express itself other than in just bodily sensations – he uses the ‘energy body’, which for me seems to be a way for bodily sensations to visualise in a not-story way (e.g. seeing some flow of energy in the body that is blocked or the energy having a certain color). And he uses images, which seem related to active imagination, though he focuses on them being ‘iconic’ (like still images), rather than stories.

    Josephine

    August 25, 2019 at 9:36 am

  4. Great piece. Have you come across this piece yet? – https://www.coherencetherapy.org/files/Ecker-etal-NPT2013April-Primer.pdf. I thought you might find it interesting and complementary.

    Yuli Miller (@yulitmiller)

    August 26, 2019 at 6:26 pm

  5. While I might quibble with some of your proposed theories of mechanisms, which ring just a bit oddly to my ear in that classic idealistic “mechanisms of psychology way”, I thought I would this time focus on our similarities.

    Like you, I have seen personally as a doctor seen conversion disorder manifest in some extremely strange and remarkable ways, and also seen it improve and even resolve when the deeper emotions that created it were brought to light and addressed.

    Parletre: “Given that the avowed goal of meditation is internal development, perhaps we would be better served by jettisoning the language of purity and impurity entirely and discussing these phenomena in the terms that I have laid out in this short essay: as ways of encountering our affective lives that have previously been avoided.”

    It is interesting that “purifications” is a term that is used in TMI to describe a number of distinct insight stages, among them being Fear, Misery, Disgust, Desire for Deliverance, and one called Reobservation that should better be called a deep dive into one’s darkest emotions and mental aspects. It also is used to describe experiences that can occur in a stage known for “hard pain” called the Three Characteristics stage.

    So, curiously, we are on the same page on a point, in that we prefer affective terms, in my case the more elaborately descriptive and precise traditional affective names for these stages, e.g. Fear, to more euphemistic and generic term “purifications” and the ideals it represents, which seem both a regression map-wise to needless unsophistication as well as the imposition of ideals of progress that are both life-denying and also naive.

    We both prefer models that and practices are more emotionally full-range, similar to David’s comments about the Vajrayana, a spirit of relating to emotions I very much appreciate.

    We both view some of the origins of TMI as possibly relating to narcissism, a topic about which I have said more elsewhere so will just stop there except so say that traces of narcissism are extremely prevalent in all the spiritual traditions as they have come down to us today.

    We both are I think appropriately concerned that dangerous shadow sides can result from ideals of purity when applied to a flesh-and-blood human.

    Thanks for writing the piece and starting this conversation. May it yield benefits for practitioners of both the meditative and psychological arts. Best wishes!

    danielmingram

    November 22, 2019 at 1:23 am


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