Building off the previous posts on the ineffability of psychedelic experiences and language, I wanted to continue using insights from Shlomo Giora Shoham that sheds light on the topic.
I’ve written a basic introduction to his ideas here. In his book, The Violence of Silence, Shoham lays out the argument that it is the participant vector of our personality that leads us to seek closer communication with both the object and other people. The separant vector is what interferes with or blocks the communication with the object or with other people. This means that in any encounter, we desire for a deeper and more full communication than we actually reach. There are multiple reasons for this which I’ll get into in a moment. First, we’ll continue on the theme from a previous post where Patrick Lundborg argues that language fails to capture the transcendental Here and Now, a statement with which Shoham would agree.
“Our contention is that language must have a levelling effect on the finesse and subtleties of meanings. Language caters for the impersonal Heideggerean das Man — the “they” with their small talk, cocktail parties, gossip columns, commercials, and election speeches. Whenever an impersonal cliche is called for language is an adequate tool of communication. It is also the sole means of communication in the most shallow encounters of daily life and sociocultural routines. But whenever a deeper level of communication is sought for, language becomes cumbersome, awkward and many times painful.” (VS 40)
The Ineffability of Cuddling a Cat
Language is good for the shallow communications, for basic information exchange, but fails for deeper communication. He suggests that this might be the reason why novels and plays that convey deep and subtle nuances of experience and emotion that have a wide range of intelligibility are so rare. Language doesn’t refer to a specific emotion or thought that an ego feels and wishes to convey.
The reason for this is that ordinary language, the language of transactions and gossip, is effable because it gets packaged and coded in the same way for most people. If I intend to convey to my wife that I am taking the car to go to the grocery store, those thoughts are coded into the language “I’m taking the car and going to the grocery store.” This is then decoded in my wife’s mind to mean “Alex is taking the car and going to the grocery store”. The words and the intention being conveyed is generic enough that it is coded and decoded in the same way.
If I intend to convey the emotion I felt while cuddling with my cat while she purred and looked into my eyes, that would be much more difficult, especially if the person I intended to communicate with had never experienced that, let alone been around a cat! (This is similar in nature, but still different from the Mary’s Room thought experiment) If that seems difficult, imagine trying to use ordinary language to describe the emotions you felt during a psychedelic experience. How do you convey the emotions behind feeling at one with the universe, enveloped in love, and utterly devoid of a sense of self?
This is no ordinary encounter with another person either. Communicating this type of experience is deeper than any routine transaction we might make with another person. Metaphors might be the closest thing we have to conveying this experience, but the successful deliverance of a metaphor to another person depends on that person being able to relate to the metaphor. Metaphors rarely transfer across cultures.
So what happens when we try to authentically communicate? Shoham would argue that even if we’ve began a communication with someone and have reached a dialogue we will still “aim at a more complete ‘fusion of souls’ when the partition between ego and alter, hopefully, melts down and an intersubjective communication is attained.” (VS, 12) No matter how deep the communication, the participant vector longs for more, that is, if our ego doesn’t get in the way first.
Shoham suggests that the ego projects its authentic sense of uniqueness onto the alter (the other person) and then expects the alter to perceive, understand, and feel his authenticity and make the necessary adjustments to promote a meaningful dialogue. This expectation is unreasonable. Once the ego realizes from the subsequent experiences that it was expecting the impossible the separant vector kicks in and creates or expands an alienating and separating rift between it and the other. (VS, 36)
The Ineffability of Depression
If we take the memoirs and accounts published by people with depression about it, which we absolutely should, then it reveals that one of the key features in depression is a lack of connection and the seeming lack of even the possibility to connect.
Two examples to illustrate the point: David Karp notes,
It was impossible to listen to depressed people without being struck by the frequency with which themes of “isolation,” “withdrawal,” and disconnection” came up. As with all feelings and emotions, isolation is experienced in different degrees and hues. Some individuals feel obligated to withdraw from virtually all arenas of social life. Most people though, unless they become hospitalized, struggle through their daily obligations, sometimes heroically maintaining a façade of “normalcy.” Others may continue to associate with friends and family while nevertheless feeling disengaged, uncomfortable, marginal, and profoundly alone. (Karp, Speaking of Sadness, 34.)
Further characterizing this isolation, Karp continues,
We all necessarily make distinctions among people in terms of their capacity to appreciate our inner life. Thus, the decision to keep the pain of depression private casts others into the status of strangers, persons who are near and distant at the same time. They may be proximate in an immediate physical way, but they are perceived as distant because we do not share with them the perceptions and emotions that most centrally define our experience of the world. Since depression dominates one’s ‘lived world,’ keeping it secret dramatically distances sufferers from everyone, including family and friends with whom they might have a significant volume of daily conversation. (Karp, Speaking of Sadness, 37-38.)
The rift between the ego and the alter, the other person, becomes the size of the Grand Canyon. It is an impassable gulf between the depressed person and any other entity. The separant vector is in full control.
The reason that psychedelics are so effective in healing depression is that they restore the system in balance between the separant and participant vectors. Shoham suggests that the two vectors of personality, separant and participant, provide crude psychic energy with the strain of the Tantalus Ratio (the gap between our yearning for participation and the subjectively defined distance from our participatory goals) providing the motivational direction for actual behavior. In the case of the depressed person, the subjective distance between ourselves and our participatory goals (connecting with another being) is immense and so the only motivation that exists is to cease trying to connect.
Matthew Ratcliffe notes that another commonality among those with depression is the difficulty of expressing it to another person–even without the felt gulf between them and another person. It just isn’t conducive to language. Just as the psychedelic is difficult to explain, so is the depressed experience. Why? Because depression is a participatory experience of a specific kind. Ratcliffe argues that human experience of a pre-reflective sense of belonging to a shared world. This experience is altered in depression.
Depression is participation with itself. The person is subsumed and obliterated so that all that remains is the depression and it’s new world. This manifests in the felt-experience of lack of possibility, another key feature in those with depression. It sucks away all hope and leaves the individual feeling like it is no longer possible to escape this world. Not only can they not connect with other people, but it is no longer even possible to connect with another person.
Psychedelics seem to aid in healing people with depression. One way that they appear to do so is by promoting a sense of connectedness. This is advocated by Robin Carhart-Harris and his colleagues. In my estimation they are correct, at least partially. The way psychedelics promote that connection is immersing the individual in a true participatory experience. One in which everything is connected. But, even more importantly, it also shows that connection is possible. Even if we are unable to convey the felt sense of the experience (of depression and psychedelics), the psychedelic experience brings back authentic communication and connection. It shows that we are not confined to language alone. It brings us out of the despair of language that Shoham talks about. Language is not required for connection and, in fact, it might be a hinderance in many cases.
Defense Mechanisms: The Downfall of Authentic Communication
The other hinderances that psychedelics seem to reduce are defense mechanisms. Shoham suggests that defense mechanisms are another barrier to authentic communication. The successful defense mechanism allows one to avoid anxiety by distorting or denying the underlying conflict. Given the inability of attaining the Sisyphean separant or the participant Tantalic desires, Shoham would say that nearly all human behavior is a defense mechanism against the reality of that claim, but it is possible to remove defense mechanisms as a barrier to that understanding. What is key is that these defense mechanisms are unknown to us but nonetheless keep us from communicating authentically. One example is described by R. D. Laing which he calls Elusion.
Elusion is a double pretence. I project on my alter an ideal or exaggerated image of himself and I pretend that this exaggerated image is real and expect the alter to fulfil my illusory expectations from him. In other words, we are in love with the idea of something, like love, rather than the person (or us) themselves. We project on them an idealized version of ourselves and an idealized version of themselves and expect them to fulfil the desires of my idealized self rather than my actual self. This way, I don’t have to find out if they will actually fulfill my wants and needs, protecting myself from disappointment. They then necessarily fail to fulfill my desires. Why? Even if they fulfill the desires of my ideal, my ego is still disappointed because those weren’t my desires or needs, they were a projection of my ideal’s desires and needs. This most likely happens without my explicit awareness.
At this point, there are a few options: 1) I cut ties with them and search for another to repeat the process with, 2) I settle and continue with them for any number of reasons, 3) I become aware of this defense mechanism and learn what my actual wants and needs are so that I can authentically communicate with this other person, devoid of pretences and projections. The third option is far less common than it should be. However, psychedelics seem to help improve the chances of that option.
As I, and others, have written elsewhere, one hallmark feature of the psychedelic experience is the feeling of noesis, a revelatory insight. In many cases this insight can take the form of self knowledge. Seeing one’s life from an outsider’s perspective, as is common in the psychedelic experience, allows for one to see their defense mechanisms, to see the harmful (and beneficial) patterns in their life and provides the necessary valence to overcome these defense mechanisms. This paves the way for authentic communication with other people, perhaps for the first time in your life with some of the people, particularly those who spring your defense mechanisms more than others.
I’ll continue this topic in another post where Shoham suggests that authentic communication is inextricably linked to creativity.