Our Quest For Effective Living

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Contents

Dedication.....................................................................................................................................vAcknowledgments................................................................................................................................ixOur Quest for Effective Living: How We Cope in Social Space....................................................................................xiBook One We Divide Ourselves The Second Path Phenomenon Manages our Unmentionables...........................................................1Book Two We Build Moral Walls Around Us The Closed Worlds Phenomenon: We Are Often Wrapped in Moral Communities..............................25Book Three We Transcend The Access-to-the-Ultimate Phenomenon................................................................................51Book Four We Become Connected The Link Phenomenon: It Gives Meaning to Our Lives.............................................................79Conclusions: Looking Through the Window into a New Science.....................................................................................105Addendum Applying This Book's Vision to Understanding and Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome among Iraq War Veterans.....................109Notes..........................................................................................................................................111Index..........................................................................................................................................115

Chapter One

Most of the time, we more or less know what we are doing. As we go about our daily work, as we follow some sort of a career, we show ourselves to be reasonably confident and self-assured. Yet behind that public posture, our career can hide a dimension - a Second Path - that is quite different. That Second Path grows out of our career's daily Unmentionables - our uncertainties, fears, rages, inappropriate honesty, and more. These Unmentionables may exist, persist, and even continue to grow in subterranean ways. They can occasionally erupt into the open, unpredictably and destructively transforming one's life. They can also contain some of what is best in us: our uncompromising sense of decency.

My first clue to the concepts of Unmentionables and a Second Path came when I learned about the suicides of a number of Holocaust survivors after they became highly successful writers. Among these were Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Jean Amery, and Bruno Bettelheim.

These persons had evidently found ways to lead meaningful and productive lives after surviving the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet eventually, after apparently successful, productive, rewarding, and meaningful lives, they each committed suicide.

After surviving the Auschwitz concentration camp, Primo Levi briefly resumed his career as a chemist. But he soon turned to writing - and what a writer he became! He wrote about his experiences in the concentration camp. He was not a survivor who wallowed in suffering, who reiterated the horror of the horrors. He wrote as a participant and as a scientist who observed and reflected. He shared poignancy about specific events and transcending insights that went beyond the individual events. He showed us the unique and the universal. He created balance between acknowledging the life-denying horrors and asserting life-affirming human dignity amid the horrors. His discernment seemed to lift him above the seductions of evil.

Beyond his writings about Auschwitz, Primo Levi turned to topics that had little to do with the woes of human existence and much to do with celebrating life. He wrote of the joys to be discovered in nature and the inner world of science. In both, his fine-tuned spirituality softened the harsh impersonality of scientific reasoning. It seemed that Levi had found a way to celebrate the vibrancy of life. He had discovered for himself - and shared with those of us who read his writings - fresh ways to enjoy and celebrate membership in the human community. He had done so through the healthy process of becoming a creative and active contributor to that community's zest for life.

Yet this man committed suicide. And he was not alone. As I began to investigate, it became disconcertingly clear that a number of Holocaust survivors who had become highly successful people committed suicide. What was going on? Perhaps, as my friend, the writer Henryk Grynberg, states, these individuals had not truly "survived" the horrors. To be sure, they survived physically. But emotionally and psychically, they had not survived; their early pain remained. The life-negations lived within them. They could never cleanse themselves of the poison planted in their souls.

It may be that among these individuals was an internal, escalating process, the very obverse of their public careers. Despite their outward successes and apparently successful and satisfying lives, their subconscious senses of vulnerability, fear, and terror, as well as guilt for having survived - what we generally classify as survivor guilt - had never been resolved, but instead actually grew. This hidden subterranean path had a life of its own. Over time, this Second Path became so volatile that it eventually erupted, dominating the individual's psyche and was expressed in the final act of total despair: suicide.

Sigmund Freud saw the unconscious as being a part of one's personality that is largely hidden from conscious awareness, usually a result, in Freud's view, of very early life experiences. The task of psychoanalysis, Freud said, is to retrace and rediscover these early, damaging experiences. I suggest that the second part of this formulation may need to be amended.

I am suggesting that there is also a subconscious - the hidden part of one's personality - that may be fed continually by one's ongoing life. It is made up of characteristics that are currently disagreeable and frightening. As part of our daily lives, we are continually shunting new awarenesses into a hidden niche - the subconscious - because we perceive them as unacceptable and dangerous to ourselves. In the case of the Holocaust survivors who became successful, it is surely an error to assume that all facets of their post-Holocaust lives were comfortable, cozy, and satisfying. Instead, being nuanced and sensitive people, they could perceive many fearsome elements in their present lives. It is conceivable that their survivor guilt actually kept on growing while worldly success emphasized their increasing feeling of accountability to those who did not survive. Were their post-Holocaust successes - the awards they were receiving, their new financial affluence - were these telling them that they were dancing on the graves of their loved ones? Was each award, each new acclaim for their writings, each "success" regarded as more failure? As their success increased, so may their sense of dissonant linkage to those who were left to die, increasing their stored anguish and fragility.

A Primo Levi biographer, Myriam...