Fantasy and Mental Health, Part IIIa

Fantasy and Mental Health Treatment

This is a photograph of “The fantastic.”

Why fantastic? Because it encompasses “The Objective” and “The Subjective”.

The Universe is incomprehensible which puts it in the realm of “The Subjective”, although at night when one looks heaven-ward, we see the “Objective Universe.”

The above picture of a “star in formation,” photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope is, like the Grand Canyon below, a fantastic wonder of nature.

We can’t know the universe like we know a tree outside our front door. With the Universe, there are no land and sky features to frame it up. Even so, the Universe and the Grand Canyon, like the tree outside our front door, are all are “occurring” with or without us being there.

The actual Universe is the furthest “thing” from our sense of reality. Why? Because we “see” it as a function of light waves traveling through space and time. What we think we see may no longer exist (in real time) - at least this is what Science tells us. Just because we are looking at it, doesn’t mean it’s there.

To see something “fantastic” generates a feeling within me of awe and wonder. In portraying the universe, scientists are artists (or translators) of sorts because most of the universe consists of light waves undetectable by the naked eye.

There are things in nature that I, or anyone else for that matter, can’t come close to comprehending. “There is more to be seen than meets the eye.” Recall: POV=”minds eye”

If what “out there” is so astonishing, what exists if we “go inside ourselves” is equally awe producing but also difficult to comprehend.

This is what Freud conjectured when he envisioned, back in his day, the unconscious. See my earlier entry: Transference and the Unconscious, July 16, 2022

Whether it be the Universe or the Unconscious, Point of View (POV) is not possible without imagination, imagination is not possible without memory, memory is not possible without mind, and mind is not possible without you.

I’m leaving all our biological and physiological hardware out of it: Brain, frontal lobes, body, eyes, our auditory system, etc. because although these are essential for living, they are secondary to what I’m talking about.

I was sitting alone in my house the other day. It was early evening. The snow was falling, everyone was gone except me. The cat was sleeping. For some reason - I can’t tell you why - I started feeling sad, down, despondent. I thought, “something must be wrong with me.” Why? “Because I’m feeling sad and despondent and I can’t attach these feelings to any thought or recollection, nothing is going on for me to be sad about.” It was quick, extremely quick, I started to scan (mentally scan) and within milliseconds I fixed on an issue (Problem A). Something wasn’t right, a loose end, a conflict, a mistake I made, something out of place, a stupid way I acted toward someone or something. I now have a concrete problem. My feeling state has a home. And, my mood drops further because I have something to latch onto and, in this case, a good-sized problem.

What happened here?

Am I chronically depressed? Do I have depressive tendencies? Is there, indeed, something wrong with me. My first inclination was to fight off this feeling or run away. I tried shifting my thoughts to something pleasant. “I can’t deal with this problem now, so forget it.” But, my POV is fixed on a real problem. Once there, I was piling up more problems around it. I thought to myself, “Keep this up and I will be entrenched in despondency.”

Has anyone else felt this?

It’s just another of the myriad of mental states easy to get into. It’s worse when you start piling up actual problems around a despondent POV.

Sometimes in therapy, perhaps in clarifying a diagnosis, I will test how difficult it is for someone to shape a POV: I start by naturally saying good things about the person, like a supportive cheerleader. Joe, think about the positives, you have a good job, your family loves you, you just got a raise from your employer, and so on. I watch to see how much impact it has on influencing POV. Later, I do the same, only with a negative slant. “You’ve been telling me you are stressed at work, you just had a small argument with one of your children. Yesterday, the battery in your car was dead.” I watch again to see if this shifts (POV). A person might say say, “Bob, this isn’t helping me right now. I already know all these things. I want you to stop telling me my problems, I’m not paying you for this.” I’m careful not to extend it too long, but it can get a baseline which I use later to see if the person is shaping his or her own POV. I do this for other reasons like, learning what strategies a person uses to shift a negative POV.

Hypnosis is a potent POV shaping tool, but with hypnosis it’s difficult to get feedback from the person in a hypnotic state. Carl Jung was intrigued by the power of hypnosis to shift POV, but eventually he gave it up because he was unable to get at questions he had about the internal workings of a client.

We all have POV even if we are not aware of it. There are many examples. For one, we have different levels of POV, there is a conscious POV and an unconscious POV and sometimes these conflict. Recall, POV is always “The Subjective” so it is flexible.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a strategy that shapes POV. After all, CBT is a very simple “Objective-Based” paradigm. Thoughts impact feelings which then impact behavior. What could be more straight-forward than this. A common example that CBT practitioners use when introducing POV.

You are at home in bed. You hear a noise downstairs (Stimulus). You interpret the noise (POV). If you think A: a burglar breaking into your house, the emotion FEAR follows. You are ready to call 911 (behavior), then your fear engages bodily sensations (heart races, sweating, muscles tense). B: your cat has knocked something off the table, ANNOYANCE follows. You think: I will pick the object off the floor tomorrow as you go back to sleep.

“You” determine what follows based on POV (CBT people call this the “Thoughts-Behavior-Feelings” triad.

A CBT schematic for unexplained physical symptoms:

This paradigm is an expert’s explanation for how we shape POV around chronic pain. Few would disagree. CBT boils down to core personal beliefs or POV about ones-self. A core belief is simply a POV. See the diagram below:

POV is the product of imaginal projection. It is the culmination of our awareness of who we are, our capacity to use our imagination to tell us who we want to be, and the barriers preventing us from doing or being what we want. It’s manifestation is a “conscious” phenomenon, but it’s influenced by our personal consciousness, our personal unconscious, and likely a collective unconscious that operates on all human beings. POV is a manifestation of our Will, but it is also a feature of forces that we do not have direct access to.

For example, if you are a deeply traditional religious person, you might access a POV:

“IT’S IN GOD’S HANDS.”

By saying this, “It’s in God’s Hands” and then believing it, you are deferring to God (God is just another word for the Fantastic - think the Universe)? You can’t really have an actual face-to-face personal relationship with God without imagination, but using POV, you can talk to God and God can talk back to you, God can answer your questions, even, at times, give you what you want. You are ALWAYS in control of your own POV by believing in God, but then “God” accesses features within you that you are sometimes not aware of (and if you are not aware of these features, then, perhaps, they really do come from God). That’s how prayers are answered. Prayers are always answered; that is, if you want them to be answered. That’s POV in action.

I return to the original question.

What, exactly, is POV? and How do I personally recruit my own POV?

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Something is bothering you.

I’m quite sure this statement is TRUE. I don’t care who you are. No one exists on this planet without something bothering them.

To be bothered is to be alive.

Why is everyone bothered?

Because no one gets their way 100% of the time. No one meets all their personal goals 100% of the time. No one is treated with respect, love, reverence by others 100% of the time. I could go on and on. The United States, our fundamental economic system, is bothersome because it is based on the principle of “self-interest.” You get yours first and others get theirs afterwards. I’m the last person who would argue against our capitalistic way of life because I have a fridge full of food, two cars in my garage, a very nice roof over my head, and so forth. But, what I am saying here is that we, as human beings, have created a system of “haves” and “have nots”. Both groups experience bother.

What is “bother”?

Bother is defined as: (intransitive verb) 1. To cause to be irritated, especially by repeated acts; trouble or annoy: synonym: annoy 2. To make agitated or perplexed; upset. 3. To intrude on without warrant or invitation; disturb.

When a person feels “bothered” they also feel irritated, troubled, perplexed, upset. They feel like life is intruding on them. When I say life, I mean “problems” “issues” “unwanted circumstances” and so on.

The source of bother can be from within or without.

Dr. I feel so ashamed, but the problem is I’m not sure why. I guess I am ashamed because I’m 45 years old and I’ve never been married. OR I’m 50 years old and I’ve never had a stable career or even a good-paying job. Or I’m 60 years old and my adult children hate me. The list goes on endlessly. OR I just feel upset, disrupted, out of sorts and I can’t identify why? It’s a mystery. I think I might have a disease because I’ve got this chronic itch all over my body.

This list itself might start bothering you, and if you you weren’t particularly bothered when you started reading it, now you are bothered by it. Bother is quick to latch onto people, and it’s like an infectious disease. If you are exposed to people who feel bothered, you will soon feel bothered.

BEING BOTHERED IS POV

Below is a visual illusion. Look at it and you can see many things, some apparent, some not so apparent. The illusion is black and white, figure ground, and angulation, all features of vision that pull out dissonance and pushed to the extreme, irritability or BOTHER.

Next is a peaceful image. The sky with clouds. This image is easy to look at. It is what it should be, nothing hidden here. It influences a feeling of ease and calm. For most people, this is Not a bothersome image.

Our sensory systems are set up for emotional awareness. Vision, hearing, kinesis (contact with skin), smell and so forth are connected through the mind and brain to emotion systems that engender emotion states.

We DO NOT need visual or tactile or auditory stimuli to generate emotional states. We can do it using imagination. Recall that imagination is simply POV and in this regard, it is subjective. Imagination is “The Subjective” in its purest form. BOTHER is a subjective state. BOTHER is a state of mind. BOTHER is due to you and your way of thinking. BOTHER is your POV.

HOW TO HARNESS POV? THIS IS IN MY NEXT ENTRY BECAUSE I’VE HIT MY ENTRY SUBSTACK WORD LIMIT.