This page discusses in more detail some theories and practices that inspired the Symbolic Space approach. It is a work in progress: it will take some time to organise all the knowledge and experience accumulated over the years into a coherent, succinct text. I plan to continue working on it. As of now, this is a description of one small aspect of the work — one practical piece that is somewhat easy to communicate and to use to begin the dialogue about Symbolic Space.
“The original condition of human beings, prior to the development of self-reflective consciousness, must have been a state of inner peace disturbed only now and again by tides of hunger, sexuality, pain, and danger. The forms of psychic entropy (uncontrolled mind wandering) that currently cause us so much anguish — unfulfilled wants, dashed expectations, loneliness, frustration, anxiety, guilt — are all likely to have been recent invaders of the mind. They are by-products of the tremendous increase in complexity of the cerebral cortex and of the symbolic enrichment of culture. They are the dark side of the emergence of consciousness.”
~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi1.
The divided self
The anguish that Csikszentmihalyi talks about makes us feel fragmented, as if each of us has multiple parts of the self that are at odds with each other. We might feel pulled in different directions by our needs and wants, by our rational thoughts and our fears, by the desire for success and the feeling of being not enough or by our spiritual and physical goals (as discussed, for example, in McNamara, 20222).
Conscious and unconscious knowledge
There are multiple reasons for perceiving the self as divided. One of the main aspects of being self-conscious is the very limited resource of attention. While we are constantly bombarded with a virtually infinite amount of information at each moment, our attention — our conscious brain — can attend to only several bits of information at a time. However, not all the unattended information is lost. Our unconscious mental processes do pick up on many different aspects of information, but much of this information does not readily enter conscious awareness or verbal expression (see, for example, the book The Whole-Brain Child (2011) by Siegel and Bryson for a detailed discussion3). The easiest example is nonverbal communication — the unconscious self picks up on the tone of voice, gestures, posture, the distance to another person, but rarely does all this wealth of information get into our attention. Nonverbal communication is a good example, but it is just a very thin layer of what else is there.
There is much more knowledge in our unconscious perception, much deeper knowledge. Yet, growing up in cultures prioritising rational, analytical thinking, we lost the tools for accessing this knowledge. While we have no conscious awareness of this knowledge, it is there, trying to get our attention, which might result in a feeling of being fragmented — having different, disagreeing parts of the self (as discussed in No Bad Parts (2021) by Schwartz4).
The multilayered brain and the bodily senses
Some theories in biopsychology and neurobiology talk about a “vertical divide” — the differences between interpretations of sensory information by brain regions at different anatomical levels. For example, evolutionarily “older” brain regions are involved in many processes that are not primarily linguistic. However, their activity may be experienced consciously through, among other things, emotions and metaphors (as discussed in Goodwyn, 20125; see also Lakoff and Johnson, 20086). In addition, “lower” regions of the brain have access to a much less conscious yet uniquely informative knowledge of the senses. Importantly, those senses are not only the well-known five senses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing, but also the senses that operate at much more unconscious levels, senses such as proprioception (sense of the position and movement of the body and limbs), interoception (sensations originating in viscera, e.g., hunger, thirst, heartbeat, digestive urges, and air hunger), and the vestibular sense (sensory system that creates the sense of balance and spatial orientation).
Abstract and holistic aspects of knowledge
There is another type of divide of self discussed in the literature, a “horizontal divide” — a divide between the brain hemispheres, left and right. In contrast to the popular belief about the right hemisphere being responsible for creativity and the left hemisphere being responsible for logic and reasoning, both hemispheres contribute to analytical and artistic processes. The main difference between the hemispheres is not what kind of information they process, but how they do it. It is discussed at a very deep level in the works of Iain McGilchrist7. What he argues is that the main reason modern humans feel progressively abstract and isolated is that our culture placed an emphasis on the left hemisphere which is fond of categories, abstractions, and tiny details, but does not “see” a big picture. In McGilchrist’s account, this is the job of the right hemisphere; however, humans progressively get stuck in the processes of the left hemisphere which “forgets” to report its calculations and categories to the right hemisphere which can put all this information into an all-encompassing picture which includes all of life.
The integrated self
The opposite of feeling fragmented is wholeness — a sense of having a unified consciousness: when all our parts seem to orient in the same direction, to