Thinking is magical to begin with
Many years ago I was having a conversation with a friend who happened to be a psychiatrist. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I do remember that something I said prompted him to say, “That’s magical thinking.” I don’t think I had ever heard the phrase “magical thinking” before, and I wasn’t sure what it meant. But I thought for a moment, and replied, “Probably. So what? That can probably be just as good as any other kind.”
I’m still not exactly sure what magical thinking is. It seems to range from simple superstitions, like tossing salt over your left shoulder to keep the Devil at bay, to Jung’s notion of synchronicity, which refers, as I understand it, to coincidences thought for one reason or another to be meaningful. I suppose it can also include the delusions of the certifiably deranged.
Shortly before his death, J.R.R. Tolkien took his private secretary, Joy Hill, for a walk, during which he introduced her to all his favorite trees, and even showed her how he communicated with them (if memory serves, he did this by placing his hands on them and leaning forward until his brow touched their bark, after which some sort of silent colloquy ensued).
I have mentioned before in this column that I have certain stones that I feel especially attached to and have from the moment I first laid eyes on them. I feel similarly attached to my house plants. I think of them as persons. I feel certain they have a sense of who I am.
Is this magical thinking? Maybe. But if so, it is only because there is something fundamentally magical about thinking to begin with, and the kind of thinking I have just described may well be nearer to what thinking was like originally than what passes for such now. After all, the notion that clear and distinct ideas are the gold standard for mentation is a rather late entry into the game of thought.
Man’s primal engagement with the world was probably anything but clear and distinct. It was likely something more along the lines of what Jung — borrowing from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl — called participation mystique, more a matter of encounter than of “objective” observation. I feel pretty certain that this manner of apprehending reality survives in quite of few of us, and I would submit that it is, in some ways, a more valid way of encountering the world than the merely rational, simply because it does not so radically detach the knower from the known. (Though the laws of perspective were known by the Romans, they were not widely employed by artists until the Renaissance. Owen Barfield has suggested that this was because a shift in consciousness occurred around that time. Before that, people just didn’t see things in perspective as we now do.)
The problem with a purely rational approach to things is that it tends to downplay, and in some cases completely ignore, the role imagination plays in thought. I am not, by the way, advocating any sort of neo-primitivism. I have no wish to visit a sweat lodge, or partake in any healing rituals. One of the most embarrassing experiences of my life happened when I visited a Catholic charismatic group. The presiding padre at one point launched into what was purported to be a speaking in tongues. Whatever it was, I found it repellent, and took the first opportunity thereafter to get up and leave.
No, all that I am suggesting is that we ought to feel free to think more imaginatively than we are taught to nowadays. Above all, we need to discover how we ourselves actually think and feel about things
John Cowper Powys — that “eccentric novelist of genius,” as J.B. Priestley called him, put it quite well:
Not the wretchedest man or woman but has a deep secretive mythology with which to wrestle with the material world and to overcome it and pass beyond it. Not the wretchedest human being but has his share in the creative energy that builds the world. We are all creators. We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials.
Unfortunately, we tend to run from our own mythologies, or to bury them away, afraid that if others learn of them they will think us eccentric at best or else flat-out nuts. But such a personal mythology is actually the record of our profoundest self’s encounter with the world. My own, of course, is grounded in my Catholic faith. But one’s faith needs to be lived as a musical score is played — not with metronomic monotony, but with a generous dash of rubato. As Jesus said, the law was made for man, not man for the law.
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Yes–thinking is magical to begin with. I do like that framing, Frank.
I found it interesting that you conclude with “But such a personal mythology is actually the record of our profoundest self’s encounter with the world. ” And that I agree with as well. Yet you contradict yourself in your seeming disparagement of sweat lodges, healing ceremonies, and your example of the Catholic charismatic group. I maintain that those experiences might very well be someone’s personal mythology, and just as relevant and appropriate to their lives as any.
I like the image of Tolkien communing with his trees. I, too, have felt a deep personal connection to certain places and have explored those connections in my writing.
Best,
Lisa
Hi Lisa,
The reason I wanted to distinguish what I was getting at from sweat lodges, healing ceremonies, and glossolalia is that in my contact with such it has always seemed to me to be forced, an exercise in fashion, not something rising up from the depths of the participant’s personality. I don’t think we can get very far by pretending to be hunter-gatherers, but I do think we can discover things in ourselves that are rooted in the primal experience of reality. On the other hand, if someone wants to join a sweat lodge or a healing ceremony, who the hell am I to object? I am less sympathetic to the Catholic charismatics, who seemed to me too dependent on signs and wonders. As they say in Zen: Before you enter upon the way of Zen, a tree is just a tree. But once you enter upon the way, a tree is no longer a tree. Should you achieve satori, however, a tree is just a tree. The trick, ultimately, is to apprehend the miracle of being … as it actually is.
Ents. That explains ents.
Hi Sarah,
It does indeed.
Frank,
This is the loveliest article! Thinking itself IS magical. I looked up the etymology of magic, and of course, it has to do with the Magus, the priest, the expert.
For a psychiatrist to label some things as “magical thinking,” though it is a term of art for them, it is actually thinking as a Magus. It invites a recursive loop: The psychiatrist, the Magus, calls something else that he/she has not uttered, they call it magical thinking. They are thinking in the manner of the Magus, meaning magically, by naming the other with a derisive name, as if they do not do it themselves.
If you want to challenge a psychiatrist, you should have science to back the challenge. In the February Archives of General Psychiatry, the researchers in Iowa finally published what they’d known for some years: Antipsychotic drugs cause brain shrinkage–at least in Schizophrenics.
Should we be using the same drugs to treat anger in non-psychotic children? Should we allow Magi to pseudo-diagnose the tantrums our children exhibit in response to the chaos in which we bathe them? Should we allow psychiatrists to shrink our children’s brains, especially now that science has published peer-reviewed evidence that these drugs have that effect?
I saw a child recently I’d seen 4 months before. He has never been psychotic. In the meantime, he was taken off the antipsychotic drug his doctor prescribed for anger. His mother stopped them, because she could no longer stand what they were doing to him. To my eyes, this child suddenly looked alive and emotionally responsive, and I said so to both him and his mother. They both laughed with gladness.
Purely clinically, “magical thinking” is a term of art for psychiatrists. But it is a bad one. It is far better to describe the phenomenon, than to give it that name. When it occurs with a psychotic person for instance, it is when they believe they can change commercials on TV by blinking. And they do it repeatedly, to prove it is possible, and they make up reasons for the times it was not successful.
The term “magical thinking” when used as a label to refer to people, especially when connected to the power to prescribe drugs that have awful side-effects, including shrinking the brain–this term is not only pseudoscience, it is evidence of a lack of schooling in social science, which is still a young field, though older than brain-science.
Only Freudians call the Jungian concept of synchronicity magical thinking. In Jung’s notion, it is an acausal connecting principle, where two events are linked meaningfully, not through causality. Though the word implies time-connection, they do not need to happen at the same time. Freud and Jung both knew the same phenomena they were describing, but each had a different description psychically for how they happened. Brain-science waits to catch up.
In the 16th century, some protested about the communion ritual. Some thought it was a re-enactment, like the seven-hundred-thirty-thousandth time they had seen West Side Story. They couldn’t stand that this ritual was called a sacrifice, as if the priest were a Pagan Roman priest who would pull up the lamb, kill it, and offer the bloody flesh to the communicants, each and every time a different lamb they pretended was the same lamb. Those that protested thought it happened once and only.
Mircea Eliade pointed out in his book, “The Sacred and the Profane,” that in any religion, the central ritual creates the world. In sacred space, there is no time. So when the ritual unfolds, it is not a re-enactment.
It is definitely not the 730,000th time Jesus was sacrificed. [that number comes from one mass a day times 365 days a year times 2000 years. Its a rough estimate.]
Instead, the participant in the ritual is witnessing the founding of the world, as the religion describes it. For Catholics, it means in the mass, they are not watching Calvary on TV. They are at Calvary, almost as time travelers, except that there is no time, and this is time zero. And because it is time zero, they can take their own suffering, their current sadness, shame, guilt, pain, and they can mystically participate in the execution. They can allow that part of themselves to be killed now, as Jesus was killed then. And as they eat the bread of communion they know is not cannibalism, they know the resurrection happens as their gut digests the bread, and the savior gives them new life, free of the the pain, the guilt, the shame…
Yes, a psychiatrist poorly schooled in the social sciences could call this magical thinking.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith might call it heresy.
A Jungian might call it synchronicity.
Thinking is magic, wonder, and love, when it is done best.
Thank you, Frank!
“But such a personal mythology is actually the record of our profoundest self’s encounter with the world.”
No. It is a record of our profoundest self’s imagination of the world. That’s quite a different thing. It is important to keep our imaginings distinct from our empirical observations or we crash endlessly around arguing about angels on pin heads.
What I read here is an attempt to justify religious delusion and yet again give credence to the incredible.
But at least I now know more about the origin of the Ents.
I think you underestimate how much the notion of “empirical observation” is itself a product of human imagination. Your use of the phrase “religious delusion” also suggests you have already made up your mind as to what religion amounts to. Be that as it may, regarding empirical observation, Jonah Lehrer recently noted in a piece in The New Yorker that “… all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.”
There are many different ways of knowing something, and our modern, western, reductionist philosophy ignores many of these ways, or treats them with disdain. For example, we may know of some emotion, such as love, only by experiencing it. We may know of the existence of some entity only by being in its presence, as the Sufi Illuminationist philosopher Suhrawardi argued. Some thoughts on this here:
http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2009/07/on-knowing/
Wonderful comments! Magical thinking is one of the things that makes us human. It’s vital for our inner lives, whether it’s creating our own personal mythology or re-creating the founding moments of our spiritual disciplines. Our imaginative and spiritual lives are immeasurably enriched by it.
However, magical thinking has its limits. If it leads me to disregard the laws of the physical universe or make up my own facts to prop up a belief system, it can lead to trouble. I may imagine that I can fly in my own internal mythology, for instance, but I’m in for a world of hurt if I jump off a tall building in real life. Rational thinking must work in tandem with magical thinking to temper it and maintain its role as the wellspring of our creative lives.
I’m with you, Frank–this is about returning to a way of being in the world that has to do with “encounter more than observation.” Our Western culture’s limiting of knowledge to objective observing has gotten us into a heap of ecological and social trouble. It would do us all good to touch our foreheads to trees a little more often. In my field of religious studies a new topic is emerging called “new animism,” which is all about investigating the world through the lens of relationships rather than distanced observation. One of the pioneers in the field is here. My own recent ode to a ponderosa pine friend may be found here.
I love the idea of thinking at all. I am in AA and have tried to have several conversations with people in the arena of thoughts that have come from prayer and meditation.
I have had to leave several groups because I spoke up about these things, not during the meetings but before and after. Just speaking with someone and them telling another had made me out to be some nut with really wierd thoughts.
What I find funny about all of this is the thoughts were meant to be considerations, not saying that anyone has to follow anything just sit, be still and think.
Anyway loved the article and I will always be willing to put myself out there, for I think the considerations come from a much greater power than I.
God Bless
Peace be with You
Along the lines of Frank’s response: “I think you underestimate how much the notion of “empirical observation” is itself a product of human imagination.”
@GBJ — How does empirical observation prove to you that I exist? Wouldn’t the process, given the confines and limitations of this kind of Internet communication, become very similar to an imaginative encounter with the world? — even the kind that leads to a solid belief in certain things you would label as delusion? I have always found off-hand dismissal of possibilities outside the established “realities” of the world to be foolish and profoundly sad.
I’m pretty sure that even someone like Albert Einstein would agree that empirical observation is a product of human imagination, which he referred to as “thought experiments”, upon which his theories were founded.
Maybe I’m mis-extrapolating but I’m wondering, Chris Matarazzo, if you think that Herr Einstein’s musings, theories and conclusions were off- hand,foolish and profoundly sad.
I find that pondering and trying to empircally assert the existence of the supernatural, or of “me” is perhaps an exercise in futility. And whether or not I can prove either empirically, well the former is a moot point ( so far anyway) and the latter- well , is it pertinent?
Though I don’t think that this makes the thinking that Frank is talking about any less magical.
Gracchus — as far as I know, Einstein was a proponent of imaginative thought. He never would have come to his conclusions without creative thinking and a belief that possibilities existed beyond the standard scientific and empirical approach. So, no, I wouldn’t label him as foolish or sad. I’m not sure why you think I would, based on what I said. Unless I am whollly wrong about Einstein’s nature as a scientist and thinker, which, I guess, is possible.