“When I arrived in London at the age of 34, I visited all the prominent guys working in the Philadelphia Association at the time. I saw Ronald Laing, Francis Huxley, Leon Redler, Hugh Crawford, and John Heaton. I discussed my desires, opportunities, and hopes with them, as well as the fastest way for me to get the most from them. Even at that time, 1974-75, London was expensive. I was poor, so I had to find the shortest possible way to lay my hands on all the knowledge and experience that could benefit me. I told them of my desire to discover something new, to uncover something no one had ever thought of before. All five of them had a good laugh at me. Huxley was the most searing in his comments on the impossibility of my ambition. His perspective came from the understanding that there is nothing new under the sun in psychotherapy or possibly even in other areas of human thought. Anything you can think of, someone else had already thought of. Our task is not development. Technology develops, but ethics, politics, and psychotherapy doesn’t develop. Our task is to give new forms to old wisdom, to unchanging and eternal ideas, making them relevant, attractive and interesting to the contemporary generations. So we have to make up new similes, new metaphors, new songs, new tales; we have to discover new forms and new mediums. This is the role of creativity; this is where it’s needed at the present moment. How can we convey the real and unchanging substance most effectively right now, at this moment in time?”
Andrew Feldmar, Credo
Miguel, a middle-aged man with grown children and a successful business, complained his life was without meaning. A psychotherapist named Juan Agilar took Miguel as his patient Miguel. After several session, Juan offered Miguel to climb Mount Aconcaqua together. It was a dangerous climb, one that Juan had failed to complete twice. Miguel wrote about the adventure, describing the howling winds, heavy fatigue, altitude sickness, his efforts to support Miguel, and his own doubt. Two days before summiting, they were forced to turn back, and the books ends without recounting what followed. Alphonso Lingis happened to stumble on the book by chance, and, riveted, asks:
Miguel’s despondency and his questions were about meaning, but this therapy did not proceed by interpretation, was no talking cure. It did not show him a meaningful realm to live his life; they went to stay weeks on the brute rocks and ice of the uninhabitable mountain. A domain of grandeur, but also where the human figure and its intentions were reduced to insignificance… What was the utility of knowing these extremities of wonder, anxiety, terror, desolation, toxic lassitude? Are these not states that crush people?
Alphonso Lingis, Passion