Being in the World

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم وصلى الله على سيدنا محمد وعلى ءاله وصحبه أجمعين وسلّم

Title: Being in the World

Author: Abdalhamid Evans

Publication date: 2 March 2013

Assalamu alaykum. Welcome to the Civilisation and Society Programme of the MFAS. This is the fifth of 12 sessions which make up the Technique and Science module. The lecture will last approximately 40 minutes during which time you should make a written note of any questions that may occur to you for clarification after the lecture. 

Being in the World

The subject of human Being in the World is vast. It is an intersection of religion, philosophy and psychology. This session is not an attempt to be definitive; it is an invitation to share a series of views on the subject, views that have been influential in the ways in which we find ourselves here today, being in the world. And to arrive, God willing, at a sense of pattern that will make it clearer for us.

I cannot avoid making sweeping generalisations; please consider them poetic rather than scientific, and allow me a little license by way of illustration. I will also be using the masculine pronoun. This is for simplicity; it is a grammatical decision and is not intended to exclude 50% of the human race.

I will begin with what could be considered the last word on the subject of Being in the World, which is at the same time the best opening:

Praise be to God, the Lord of all the worlds,

the all Merciful, the most Merciful,

The King of the Day of Judgment.

You alone we worship

You alone we ask for help

Guide us on the Straight Path,

The Path of those whom You have blessed,

not of those with anger on them

not of the misguided

The classical commentary of the interpretations of the last three lines of the Fatihah or Opening is that the group with anger on them refers to the Jews who killed the Messenger and deified the Law, and the group who are astray refers to the Christians who ignored the law and deified the Messenger.

Taking this as a foundational starting point, I would like to explore an evolution of the recent attempts to reach an understanding of human Being in the World and see if we can arrive at a perspective that will deepen our own perception in a way that bring more meaning to our lives, that will bring us to a blessed path.

Lets us enter into the world of psychology.

The emergence of psychology as a science in its own right has been one of the distinguishing features of the 20th century. Its evolution over the decades has been characterised by the formation of various schools of thought and methods of therapy, each one claiming to give an accurate description of the inner workings of the human creature.

As with any theoretical framework, each school bears the hallmark of its originator, and it is in this context that we can see that the major schools of psychology comply with the world-views of the major religious groups. In the words of Ibn ‘Arabi, “If you make a model of the universe, you will only make a model of yourself.”

Psychology in its modern sense is a European, and later American phenomenon; but the globalisation of culture – or what we could equally call non-culture – means that the definitions and standards of the west are in evidence in all parts of the world. 

Movies, television, music, fashion, market strategies, corporate language, advertising, all have a psychology, an unspoken view of what is normal or correct for the human creature. 

Reflecting the chronological sequence of the prophetic teachings of the Prophets Musa and then ‘Isa, peace be upon them both, and finally the last Messenger Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, we can see that the progression of western psychology follows certain clearly identifiable patterns.

We will look briefly at four identifiable contributions to the world of psychology:

  Freudian psychoanalysis, which is a Jewish psychology,

  Jungian analytical psychology, which is Christian,

  The existential psychology of Medard Boss, which is post-christian and therefor pre-Islamic,

  The Dallas school, reflecting the contribution of Dr. Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, based on a series of works that were written under his family name, that represent an Islamic perspective.

  Finally, we will draw some of these elements together to try and gain a useful perspective on the nature of Being in the World today.

Freud

Freudian psychoanalysis could only have been invented by a Jew, as Freud said without fully realising the depth of his statement. Otto Rank, a disciple who later broke away from Freud’s circle, certainly recognised this in a deeper way, stating that "Freud's whole doctrine of neurosis can be understood as a projection of the Jew's position in our present-day civilization."

Freud’s doctrine can be seen to have several major elements. 

1. The Oedipus Complex, the notion that the element of fantasy plays a more powerful role in shaping the human being than event. 

2. Positing the existence of the Unconscious which defined the human being in terms of his lowest elements and drives to which he has no access, and therefore no real ability to understand or control.

3. That society is ‘right’; it is up to the individual to adapt; the extent of his inability to adapt, marks the extent of his neurosis or illness. We can say that he ignored the importance of context.

Of these elements, I want to dig deeper into the shift that preceded the enshrining of Freud’s reading of the Oedipal legend. Freud’s original breakthrough in the treatment of neurosis and other psychic disorders came from the recognition, in many of his cases, that the origin of the neurosis was some form of infantile or childhood trauma that left an emotional scar. An event that left a mark that made it difficult for the adult to deal with certain aspects of life that served as emotional or mental triggers of that submerged event.

In attempting to cement this idea...that was met with disbelief and even horror by the medical fraternity of his day...Freud would in every case push for the appearance of childhood trauma. The line between event, memory, fantasy and wishful thinking became irrevocably blurred, and to Freud this did not matter. He posited the notion that an imagined or fantasized trauma was as forceful as an actual one; from this perspective, it was only a short step to couple this notion to the Sophoclean version of the ancient Oedipal legend. All boys wish to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. This became a biological and therefore scientific, and therefore inescapable fact.

It has long been recognised that psychoanalysis is anti-transformative in nature. It is unlikely to liberate. As psychoanalyst Philip Rieff has observed, "A therapy so profoundly informative as the analytic may actually inhibit all transformative therapies. In some respects, the analytic therapy is patently anti-transformative… Having paid, the patient has also discharged his debt of gratitude to the therapist."

Having paid, he has actually absolved himself from the need to change; he has paid for the privilege of carrying on as before. You may eventually solve the riddle, but that does not necessarily free you to change. You could call it paralysis by analysis.

It is worth noting that the German word for guilt, schuld, is also the word for debt. Debt is guilt. Guild is debt. We will see this idea emerge later.

Freud was clearly influenced by the claimed scientific certainty, popularised by Darwin and Huxley, that the Divine had no part to play in life. They stole knowledge from the realm of religion or belief, and re-positioned it in a new arena called science. Freud’s doctrine was an attempt to be scientific, and therefore emerged as mechanistic, reductionist and atheist. 

Man not only has ape ancestry, but he is motivated by his lowest biological drives, not pulled forwards by his highest aspirations. Man is trapped, defined by his pathology.

19th Century scientific orthodoxy redefined man as that creature which was distinguished from the animals by his capacity for reason and speech, rather than by his being the creature that is designed to worship the Creator. 

Jung

It is hardly surprising that many from Freud’s own inner circle were later to break away, despite the quasi-magical ring he placed on their fingers to wed them to his cause. Carl Jung, one of the very few non-Jews in Freud’s inner circle, originally hailed by Freud as his crown prince and natural inheritor, was to split with Freud on deep acrimonious terms, triggered primarily by Freud’s refusal to submit himself to the application of his own process out of fear of losing his authority.

Jung’s work, termed Analytical Psychology as opposed to Psychoanalysis, actually restored man’s spiritual capacity, to some extent, although his theoretical framework stays largely within the Freudian language and set of definitions. He expands them, finding the Freudian definitions too narrow to reflect human experience. And as we shall see, language, the terms of definition, are themselves powerful tools that determine to a large extent the limits and expectations of people and by extension societies. 

Jung certainly did not agree with Freud’s statement “The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence”

Whereas Freud had defined man in terms of his pathology, or his abnormal behaviour, Jung formulated a human psychic typology based on pairings of opposites, such as introvert & extrovert; thinking and feeling; sensing and intuiting. Within the Jungian framework, health, including mental health became a matter of balance.

Jung also moved past the concept of the Unconscious to a collective unconscious, recognising that there are identifiable archetypes within the spectrum of human possibility, an idea that had a resonance with Goethe’s concept of an Ur-phenomenon.

We can say that his contribution was an improvement on Freud’s theories, but still remained within the same field of practice. However, perhaps the most profound distinction between them is that Jung recognised that he was himself part of the process. He was inside the loop, not outside it.

His long and tumultuous search for spiritual meaning in his own life forced him to recognise that this is a fundamental need for the human being. He did not totally free himself from his Christian background which determined that his search for spiritual meaning led him into a maze of symbols, gathered from all corners of the world, and did not result in his taking a specific spiritual path himself. 

One of the key characteristics of the early schools of psychology is that in their attempts to be correctly scientific, they view man as an object, and force him to the narrow scientific criteria of measurement and proof. They also separate man from his lived environment. His anxiety, fear, and lack of security in the world are all seen as the inability to adapt to life itself. It is the fault of the individual; the social, political and economic status quo is never in question. Context is not really considered. 

Boss

The Swiss psychologist Dr Medard Boss studied briefly under both Freud and Jung, and he remained dissatisfied with both of them, finding that their theoretical frameworks did not correspond to actual lived human experience. He recognised that you could not fit the human creature into a framework that did not actually permit him to be human. 

Dissatisfied with the so-called facts of subject and object, the psyche, the body and the external world, the intrapsychic entities of id, ego and superego etc., none of which reflected an individual's lived experience of his own life, Boss was powerfully attracted to Martin Heidegger's concept of man as "Dasein" (lit. being-there). Boss took the remarkably bold step with his decision to jettison all previous theoretical frameworks and studied with Heidegger and remained his student, collaborator and friend until the end of his life.

Heidegger himself stated how important he considered Boss’s work to be, as it was a unique example of his philosophical thinking being put into practice in the therapeutic arena. With Boss, Heidegger’s ideas ceased to be about thinking, and became tools for changing people’s lives, bringing meaning and easing anxiety, pain and suffering.

Boss’s two major works ‘Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis’ written in the 60’s and his final work ‘The Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology’ from the 70’s remain unsurpassed as works of supreme importance for all scientists, not just for psychologists or doctors.

Boss challenges the philosophical assumptions that underpin any scientific endeavour, and forces us to re-examine the very basis of how we as human beings actually function in the world. As Boss observed, “Each ‘pure fact’ of any science at any given age is determined in advance by the pre-scientific notions of that particular age concerning the fundamental character of the world in general.”

His own work in psychotherapy led him to conclude that the mechanistic world-view in which, by definition, both patient and therapist were trapped, was not adequate. The task of understanding the "world" of the patient was hindered by so-called scientific terminology and methods that were in turn based on faulty and unthought-out assumptions about the nature of the human creature. He found it necessary to start again, from the beginning.

For Boss, 

"the very essence of man's existence is an immediate and primary awareness of Beingness-as-such.....This primary awareness of Beingness is - as the most fundamental feature of man's existence - not an attribute or a property which man has, but that man IS this primary awareness of Beingness, that he is in the world essentially and primarily as such. 

Man, then, is a light which luminates whatever particular being comes into the realm of its rays. It is of his essence to disclose things and living beings in their meaning and content." 

Boss builds up the picture of the human as a being whose unique fundamental nature is to be open to existence, who creates around him a "clearing" which is, so to speak, illuminated by his awareness, and within which meanings are unfolded or disclosed. Indeed, he states that "man's existence seems claimed by Being-ness as the necessary clearing into which all that has to be, may come forth and within which it may shine forth." 

So for Boss, man's awareness is "out there" in the world, rather than located somewhere inside him, and he insists that one cannot think or talk of man in any way that does not include this basic function. 

As Boss stated, "One of the immeasurable advantages of the Daseinsanalytic understanding of man lies in its making superfluous the assumption of an unconscious."

The fact that man has the capacity to choose whether to accept or refuse his possible ways of being, is for Boss the very core of human freedom, a freedom which is in turn balanced by man's being "claimed" by Beingness-as-such as that realm into which the various phenomena of existence manifest in their fullness. 

 

This description of human perception not only does away with the need for any concept of the unconscious, it allows us to understand human perception and behaviour with greater clarity than either Freud's or Jung's theoretical models. It is a description that fits with our experience that being in the world is a unified event. The mechanistic view has validity for certain things, at a certain degree of focus, but cannot be applied to human behaviour and awareness without losing the essence of the one to whom the events occur, the human being himself.

So for Boss, therapy begins with a profound shift of perspective. Within the shared awareness of the therapeutic encounter, the therapist ‘holds open’ an awareness of the patient’s state or condition, and allows the patient, step by step, to perceive his condition in  a new light, and to claim, or re-claim, this awareness as his own. 

Boss recognised the importance of the Heideggarian concept of the ‘gestell’ or enframing. We can describe this enframing as a contextual environment of references and meanings that force the phenomena of existence to reveal themselves in a particular light, such as you might get with tribal or social taboos, or today within a market economy where everything is forced to have a price-tag, or in the realm of technology where everything and everybody is seen as an available resource to be utilized. 

In a way, for Boss, the entire spectrum from neurosis to psychosis boiled down to the notion of ‘being caught in the mentality of the other’, and the task of therapy is to reclaim one’s self from this entrapment, and to arrive at his or her own sense of authenticity that can be translated into behaviour that was directed towards reaching one’s own highest potential.

…………………………

Dallas

Medard Boss built a bridge that permitted, or even forced, a radical reappraisal of medical and psychological theory and by implication, its practice. But it remained a bridge only. For as we might observe after some reflection, there is really nowhere else to take this Daseinsanalytical world view except to the door of Islam. They crossover into one another.

I would venture to say that it was not until the opening of Islam to Europe through the work of Shaykh Abdalqadir, and specifically his work under his family name of Ian Dallas, that Boss’s work can really been viewed in a new clearer light. 

Encompassing, and at the same time going beyond Heidegger’s Dasein, he opens for us in an actual way, as opposed to a theoretical way, the liveable human reality of man as slave and khalif of the Creator. Man ceases to be another object in a material world, and his personal reality, and the social form in which he lives become one unified event. The personal problem is no different to the social problem; they are views of the same phenomena at differing degrees of focus. 

Connecting us back to an authentic European tradition, the Dallas view bypasses Freud and takes us directly back to Goethe and Nietzsche. In as much as Freud’s vision is devoid of transformation or hope, Nietzsche’s work is precisely an exploration of the dynamics of transformation. Heidegger, perhaps Nietzsche’s most profound commentator, stated that all of Nietzsche’s philosophy could be seen as an exploration of one single thought, The Overman, which is itself a doctrine of the realisation of man’s highest potential.

In his work ‘The New Wagnerian’, Shaykh Abdalqadir comments, 

“Heidegger defined the five basic rubrics of Nietzsche’s philosophy as being: 

1) Nihilism. 2) Transvaluation of all values. 3) Will to Power. 4) Eternal recurrence of the same. 5) Overman.” 

From the perspective of psychotherapy, this five point plan embodies the dynamics of an authentic therapeutic experience that enables the individual to embody what Boss defined as ‘his own-most highest possibilities’. 

In Bossian terms, if you glimpse your own-most highest possibilities, they then have a claim on you. You are indebted to your highest potential, once you have glimpsed it, and you will inevitably experience a sense of existential guilt as long as it remains unfulfilled, or unattempted. You will experience, quite rightly, a sense of inauthenticity, or you might say of not really ‘being yourself’. 

Within the Dallas view, what is significant for us is that the dynamics that hold true for the renewal of an individual, also hold true for the renewal of a society. More than that, in reality, the renewal of the individual is the renewal of the society. 

The relationship between the individual and the fiscal state is one of the cornerstones of the Dallas position, and it is explored in depth in the short novel, ‘The Ten Symphonies of Gorka König’ by means of the literary device of an interview with the fictitious psychiatrist Dr. Frieda Ludendorf.

Int: In your writings you have spoken of a relationship between the crises of the psyche and political conflict.

Lud: Well, of course there must be a relationship or we would be positing insanity as the norm which it is not yet entirely. The burning crisis issue of today is the irrationality of the monetary system and the interest basis of the economy, both in the usage of worthless promissory note money which cannot be redeemed for real wealth and through its banking and market structures. These have a built-in scenario of disaster since they are not connected to physical value, gold and silver, land and commodities. The figures are in the realm of fantasy…

Int: But are you saying that this is a psychiatric problem?

Lud: Personal neurosis is always an ethical problem. This can always be solved. The political malaise on the other hand has a psychotic foundation. The argument of solving the world’s problems today through institutions which cannot get at the causes – and are actually designed to guarantee that the causes are hidden – is itself invalid…I find that a robbery is going on, under my nose, a country’s wealth is being taken by a group of internationalists without allegiance to any nation... more than that, the world’s wealth – and it is in the hands of men who are not answerable to any elected government in the world and who were not appointed by any identifiable franchise… I find the exchange of worthless paper for world control a powerful criminal act. I find that the inability to react is a serious psychosis which the masses today suffer.

It is significant that today, in the entire canon of psycho-analytical and psychological writing, there is not one serious study of the effect of paper money and the interest-based economy on the individuals inner reality. This is itself an indication of the continued dominance of the Freudian and post-Freudian view, for, while many would argue that they no longer believe in it, its language and terminology continue to be common coin throughout the world. They form part of the enframing in which we still find ourselves.

It is like a colonial power which recognises that it no longer needs a physical presence in a conquered territory if it leaves its system in place to do the job in its absence. Freudian doctrine in which the helpless pre-programmed individual cannot distinguish between fantasy and event, continues to hold sway among a populace who cannot distinguish the fundamental difference between an electronic signal and a piece of gold or a piece of land. 

As Shaykh Abdalqadir has observed "The doctrine of The Unconscious implies lack of responsibility and therefore of will…Politically, it is a methodology designed to set up subservient masses."

Nietzsche’s Overman psychology, in stark contrast, empowers and liberates. While others, such as the American existential psychologist Rollo May, have acknowledged and built upon the importance of Nietzsche’s thinking, it is significant that it would take a European Muslim to really put it in place, for Nietzsche himself lacked the vision of a lived social reality in which to locate the Overman. He glimpsed the end of Christianity and the inevitable arrival of Islam; but it was no more than a glimpse.

As Shaykh Abdalqadir goes on to disclose, through his play (1992), ‘Oedipus and Dionysus’, this creation of the mentally and physically healthy individual, and by implication, a just society, requires the renewal and transformation of both men and women.

In the postface, the author states, 

A new society needs a new man, or we would insist, a new man and a new woman, a collaborative couple. This implies, therefore, a non-Oedipal partnership, both in its past and in its formation of a possible future…The Overman must be raised in a setting free of imprinting, that assures in the emergent young that they will not helplessly fall into the robotic repetition of that infantile crime visited upon them by in turn somnambulistic parents.

The Sophoclean version of the Oedipal legend – and remember that this forms the cornerstone of psychoanalytical theory which in turn defines the psycho-political norms of modern societies – denies transcendent freedom to the hero by defining life, both political and psychic, as an inescapable and pre-designed trap. By the very act of decoding the riddle, he springs the jaws of the trap; he is caught, determined. 

In this scenario, the message is clear. Do not question, resistance is futile. Struggle will only tighten your noose.

It is not hard to recognise a parallel between this picture of the trapped individual, and the larger one of the whole society, a nation’s economy, caught in the grip of apparently mysterious market forces, that remain an unbreakable code except to a privileged few, who may, for a fee, let us in on the secret, and play the game. The monetarist expert becomes the psychoanalytical high priest. Our debt is also our guilt. 

Breaking new ground in Oedipus and Dionysus, the author deconstructs the Oedipal legend to offer a way out.

It is on going back to the sources of the Oedipal legend that it is possible to realise that there is a version of the tale which is devoid of the Sophoclean enframing…

The nub of the matter is that the deconstruction of European culture is deeply involved with the twin phenomena, the psychoanalytical programming and the inability of ‘democratic’ man to inhibit the evolution of advanced usurious practice. 

It is doubtful if banking could have reached its present position of near absolute power if man had not been re-processed as a passively acceptant victim, convinced of his own culpability, and stoically doomed to the personal and political state in which he lives and for which he heroically accepts resigned responsibility.

The infantile trauma which Freud unveiled to the world as a historical reality, became re-defined as a fantasy projection, and on this basis the procedure of therapy unfolded; that is, on a foundational ambiguity as to what was real and what was fantasy. 

If the human being could not be sure of the very core of himself…how could he be in any condition to identify the imposition of false money?

Human ‘being’, in a truly heroic and prophetic sense, implies acceptance of Divine authority and the establishment of a just and sane society. For man, the framework of the interest economy coupled with a state mechanism that takes from his hands any possibility of being actually responsible for social justice, renders him helpless, and from a psychological perspective, childlike. Caught between the fiscal state as punishing father authority, and the wife as failed mother-figure, the individual is forced to live out his Oedipal fate.

Unless of course he takes another way. In the Dallas version of Oedipus and Dionysus, our hero sees the jaws of the trap in place around him; he reads the signs, he sees what will happen; but he also recognises that the terms that are presented to him, not only offer him no escape, but are actually false. The ‘either-or’ is a false dialectic. He simply refuses that definition of existence, refuses that enframing, and refuses the role of victim. He simply walks away, free; he lets the pieces fall where they may. 

As the author reminds us, our destiny lies not in the hands of punishing parents or disapproving authority figures or a tyrannical state or an enslaving bank, but in the hands of a generous and forgiving Lord.

And it is here, at this point, that psychology collapses in on itself, and there emerges a true science of consciousness that is seamlessly wedded to patterns of behaviour. And it is here, within the field of ‘ilm al nafs’ and in Islamic sciences of tasawwuf, that we can access an opening to a correct assessment of the nature of the self, and a genuine science of personal and social transformation to another way of being in the World. 

Let us try to pull some of these strands together.

We might summarise that within Freud’s world-view, you cannot really change, you are locked in, trapped.

In Jung’s world, you can break free, but are lost in a maze of symbols, never sure of where you actually are.

Boss used Heidegger’s insights to apply a genuine scientific phenomenology that allowed the human being to be human, but did not locate him in a social setting.

Dallas relocates the human being in a new Islamic, or we might say Madinan, enframing in which things and beings can be viewed in a prophetic light, a prophetic enframing. It gives a model of sane man in just society.

Carl Jung’s archetypes and pairings of opposites find their place and dissolve into the wider science of opposites used within the Islamic tradition in such works as The Meaning of Man by Sidi Ali al Jamal whose exploration of the opposites move seamlessly between poetic freedom and algebraic clarity. The reader arrives, somewhat dazed perhaps, at the recognition that Man-in-Cosmos is only a duality by description. The reality is one. But without duality, there can be no description, and duality is where we live, it is where we find ourselves.

Man - Woman

Day - Night

Inner - Outer

Self - Other

Freedom - Destiny

Slave - Lord

The great question has always been “How do we fit in?” 

And it is a question that lingers...

Medard Boss’s Daseinsanalysis opens for us the clear understanding of the human being, claimed by Beingness-as-Such as the clearing of awareness in which the phenomena of existence appear as what they actually are. What Goethe referred to as ‘things standing in their own light’.

This claimed-ness finds its place in the pairing of Slave and Lord. Its highest manifestation is with the Prophets and Messengers, blessings and peace upon them all, whose total surrender to their claimed-ness enables their clearing of awareness to be the appearance of revelation, that Boss might call the message from Beingness-as-Such to mankind. The ultimate disclosure of meaning.

The Messengers ultimate task is to convey the message, embody the message, to become one with the message; to be the message; to find the perfect expression of the relationship between the slave and the Lord.

It is the highest and purest manifestation of Being in the World.

We cannot reach it, and yet it has an echo within our beings; there is a harmonic resonance, because the message-messenger is a man.

Not a theory; not a formula; not a book.

A man embedded in a society in such a way that we see the truth that there cannot be man without a cosmos in which he is located, nor can there be cosmos without man as its intended pinnacle of perfection.

“In the universe, it is man that is intended”

And man has wife, children, family, companions, tribe, colleagues, friends and enemies. Work and leisure, pain and pleasure. He makes love and war; he builds and destroys. He obeys, and he goes astray. He struggles  and he surrenders.

He is free to act; he is trapped by destiny.

Our Being in the World is that we are embedded in a realm of opposites,  duality whose reality is singular. Our beingness is not static; it is in constant change and flux.

How are we to find ourselves in this impossible place?

I want to finish with two postscripts.

In the end we cannot define, we can only indicate. 

And because the answer is not a formula, I can only tell a short anecdote. 

When our old companion Hajj Abdal Aziz travelled to Morocco as a young man in the sixties, seeking the truth, seeking a way to find God...he found himself face to face with Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Al Habib, maybe one hundred and ten years old, who asked him, “Why are you here?”

He replied, “I know that reality is one...but I don’t know how to find my place in it...”

The old Shaykh replied, “As for reality being One, we say ‘La ilaha ila’llah - there is no deity but God’. As for our place in it, we say, ‘Muhammad Rasulu’llah - Muhammad is the Messenger of God’

And he recognised this truth and embraced it... and it was enough for him, in life and in death.

And finally, because for me at least, the subject of Being in the World is inevitably tied up with the quest for change and transformation, I find myself reflecting upon the keys to therapeutic transformation. 

I would posit the notion that within the therapeutic arena, which is designed specifically to encourage beneficial change to occur, perhaps the greatest tool is forgiveness, for it is the key to allowing and encouraging change to take place and to take hold. 

Forgiving our parents, our family, our friends and companions, our enemies. And ourselves. This allows us the freedom, or permission, to change, to grow, to transform, to be free of our past mistakes and failures so that we might, in that turning away, be free to see our highest possibilities and reach for them without guilt or debt.

Be free from the path of those that have anger on them, or have gone astray.

Free to take the path of those who have been Blessed. 

Abdalhamid Evans

That brings us to the end of today’s lecture… 

Recommended reading includes:

The Assault on Truth, Jeffrey Masson

Against Therapy, Jeffrey Masson

Beyond Psychology, Otto rank

In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm

Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, Medard Boss

The Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, Medard Boss

The Zollikon Seminars, Martin Heidegger and Medard Boss

Heidegger and Psychology, Keith Hoeller

The Discovery of Being, Rollo May

The Ten Symphonies of Gorka Konig, Ian Dallas

Oedipus and Dionysus, Ian Dallas

The New Wagnerian, Ian Dallas

The subject of our next lecture is Concerning Technique, for which we recommend Heidegger’s book translated as The Question Concerning Technology. Thank you for your attention. Assalamu alaykum.