Mind again

William James, the greatest psychologist, looked at mental phenomena through the lens of conscious states; different states were associated with different cognitive...styles, I suppose, or processes, or something like that. He was quite clear: how you think depends on how you feel.

My own shrink work got a lot better (I think) one day when I heard a client talking about "having" feelings. No, no, I thought; you don't have feelings. You are feelings. When I am raging, every cell is raging. When I am despairing, every cell is despairing. I don't "have" rage, or despair.

And, too, when I am raging, my thought are "rage" thoughts -- not just of the object of my rage. I have a particular type of fantasy, for example, that I just don't have at other times. Usually, rage state thoughts are very clear, and very directed. The internal forces that control our rage are not usually conscious, but still are cranking away, working at preventing disaster.

We know a lot about coping with rage in others. As with most states of consciousness, we have remedies that are usually effective. With rage, the remedy is often distraction, and a weird sort of temporizing in which the raging person is simply given time to repeat internal process until the emotional fuel is exhausted. Not much sophisticated cognition goes on during rage episodes. Trying to talk someone out of a rage state is not a really useful approach.

In despair, "rational" thinking is a primary tool in maintaining the state. The despairing person thinks that life, now, is horrible and worthless. And, even better, that life has always been horrible and worthless, and always will be horrible and worthless. Engaging a despairing person in discussion -- even debate -- about all this is often helpful, and hence we have cognitive-behavioral therapy, which I have always thought consisted of nagging our clients into giving up their most despairing thoughts.

In terror states, thinking becomes concrete; ordinarily sensible, bright people become abjectly stupid, and do things that astonish us.

I (and everybody else) can go on. So what?

This, again: There is no thinking independent of mood state. None. The whole idea is silly.

So, now back to me, and isn't that always the case. Since the onset of temporal lobe epilepsy, I have had wildly changing moods, conscious states, in which I can quite easily, afterward, look at the thought patterns and cognitive structures that are characteristic of each state. Alert Reader will here pick up the earlier theme, and say, Whoa, Big Fella. You talking mind or brain?

When I look back over the episodes, I see them as "mind" material; I think "Not so good", or try to come up with new creative controls. But normative, all normative. I become preoccupied about whether my behavior was unusual or distressing to others or embarrassing to me. Mind stuff. Not brain stuff.

Then I take the meds to stabilize the brain. I'm desperate for the day I don't have to go back over every interaction, every word, and try to made sense of where it came from, and what the emotional content was. All mind stuff.

Back to William James:

William James: "If sleep were not so familiar, it would be the most dreaded of diseases". My point exactly. Except he did it in one sentence. Show off.