Getting a better balance

	Book review on Madness, Mystery and the Survival of God by Isabel Clarke Reviewed by Julian Candy, 2009 published in Network Review No 100
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As a trainee psychiatrist during the 60s, I was required to make some study of psychology.  I remember being particularly impressed by the Repertory Grid, a tool developed by Donald Bannister and based on the Personal Construct Theory of George Kelly.  The theory illuminated our capacity to make sense of our environment by elaborating and maintaining conceptual frameworks of various degrees of rigidity and variously amenable to growth.  Further, by providing a means for scaling and comparing such constructs, the Grid pointed to therapeutic opportunities beyond those offered by impractical psychodynamics and sterile behaviourism.

Isabel Clarke rightly draws out that although the RG itself has maintained only a small but persistent following, PCT has had a much bigger and continuing influence behind the scenes, forming a major part of the theoretical backdrop to today's Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, widely used in the NHS. 

She builds on this work as she begins to answer her question: how is it that belief in God and religious and spiritual practice still persist in our materialistic age?  She points out that behind everyday assumptions may lie hidden constructs that when brought to light can be seen to be incomplete or misleading.  Two of these are the Rationality Assumption: that ignorance and illogicality will inevitably be dispersed by rationality; and the Billiard Ball Mind Assumption: that the mind is the brain and both are confined within the skull, and thus we have no direct access to other brains, into which we must bump as we go through life.  Moreover, experience, which as a way of knowing she contrasts with logic, tells us that there is more to life than the rational: human relationships, the supernatural and psychosis all point to a reality not graspable by logic.

She develops her thesis by the analogy of two adjacent rooms that are both separated and linked by a threshold.  One room cool and orderly, brightly lit, everything in its place; the other mysterious, shrouded in colourful mists that reveal and conceal shifting vistas and dark places.  The first is the home of the rational, of 'either-or' logic; the second of the transliminal, of 'both-and' thinking.  Each room, each mode of being in the world is necessary to us and valuable for us.  They are complementary, not in opposition. 

Moreover, specific tracts in the brain provide the neural substrate responsible for these modes.  Two psychologists, Teasdale and Barnard, have described a detailed model of cognitive architecture, the Interactive Cognitive Subsystems (ICS), which describes the Propositional subsystem (speech and language, relatively logical and orderly), and the Intentional, or as Isabel prefers to call it, the Relational (the rest, colourful and messy).  Though reminiscent of the right brain, left brain distinction, and of that between male and female preferred casts of mind, she asserts that these distinctions are little more than misleading half-truths, and that her more complete and detailed formulation does fuller justice to the neuroanatomical and psychological complexity that goes to form the person.

So Isabel puts mystical experience, empathic relationships, certain personality structures such as schizotypy and psychosis itself in the second room.  This is neither to devalue the mystical nor to deny the reality of madness and the suffering it can cause.  Rather are they all part of that necessarily untidy yet essential aspect of ourselves from which creativity may arise.  She provides extended accounts from people who have spent significant time 'beyond the doorsill', mentioning here the significant contribution made by Peter Chadwick (SMN), not least in his Schizophrenia: the Positive Perspective (1997).  Her account of the transliminal is informed by her earlier studies of the mystical life in medieval times, by her own more recent experience in an environmental protest movement and in running conferences on related themes, and by first-hand descriptions of the creative process.

In the light of this, God's survival need not surprise us.  Rationality cannot destroy Him or Her, since our experience not our logic testifies to His or Her existence, and to the significance of the spiritual life.

While the main text of the book comprises a carefully structured exposition, thus appealing to the Propositional subsystem, the frequent insertion of poems, songs and CD recommendations provides plenty of nourishment for the Relational.

Her call for us to tolerate, indeed to welcome, apparent contradiction and contrast in modes of thinking and being is all part of her struggle to overset the Western hegemony of the rational in favour of a more balanced acceptance of both the Propositional and the Relational.  This should surely be a fun programme as well as a wise one.  Let's swing along with Isabel!

Julian Candy is a retired psychiatrist.

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