I.
Internal Family Systems, the hot new1 psychotherapy, has a secret.
“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.
Sufficiently new and popular therapies are hard to get. Therapist training starts slow - the founder has to train the second generation of therapists, the second generation has to train the third generation, and so on. IFS says they have a 10,000 person wait list for their training program. So lots of people have heard great things about IFS, maybe read a manual or two, but never tried it or met anyone who has.
What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self - a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses - and various Parts - little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.
For example, you might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it - maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby - maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain, and you won’t blame her if you get close to someone and have to break up again. Then you see a vision of Sabby stepping aside, maybe turning off the Windmill Of Relationship Sabotage or something like that, and then you never sabotage your relationships again. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the core.
All of this is the classic version everyone learns from the manual. Before we get to the secret, let’s examine two big assumptions in more detail.
First, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.
(After reading the IFS manuals, I tried most of their tricks for initiating this sort of trance and meeting Sabby or whoever. I got nothing. I notice most of the patients with great results are severely traumatized borderlines, ie the same people who often get multiple personality disorder after the slightest hint from a therapist that this might happen. We’ll get back to this analogy later.)
The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.
The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.
II.
At least this is what I take from The Others Within Us, by Robert Falconer, a veteran IFS therapist.
But it’s not just Falconer saying this. The book has a foreword by Richard Schwartz2, the inventor of IFS, where he basically endorses it. It has cover blurbs from some high-ranking IFS trainers. My impression is that everyone high up in IFS believed something like this - some as metaphor, other as literal reality. They avoided talking about it lest it scare away the normies, Falconer got tired of keeping quiet and wrote a book, and everyone else decided to come clean and support him instead of denying anything.
You can see signs of the political fractures throughout the book. It tries to soften the blow by replacing “demons” with the technical IFS term UBs (for “unattached burdens”) and it inconsistently calls exorcisms “unburdenings”. It flirts with the idea that maybe this is just a useful metaphor, then veers off into “no it’s literally real” (I want to stress that the literal reality is Falconer’s position, not necessarily that of mainstream IFS). It alternates between apologetic and defiant.
But the underlying narrative is a consistent one. The IFS community was a bunch of normal, respectable therapists, trying to practice normal therapy. But every so often, one of their patients’ Parts would admit, unprompted, to being a demon. Or, in the words of one such entity:
No, I'm not a part of her - I'm a much more powerful and beautiful being, and I'm going to crush her like a worm, the same way I'm going to crush you.
If the story about Sabby is a typical IFS session, here’s an atypical one. Another patient comes to you, once again asking for help because they’re sabotaging their relationship. You ask them to go into a trance and find the part of them involved. They meet a dragon named Damien. So far, so good. You ask Damien why he’s sabotaging the patient’s relationships, expecting to hear a beautiful story about how the patient’s mother was a doormat and this made the patient unconsciously charge a part of herself with protecting her own independence (or something). Instead, Damien says he’s sabotaging them because fuck you. This isn’t unheard of - some of these traumatized Parts are really touchy. But the therapist persists and keeps getting the same answer. On further questioning, Damien admits he’s not part of the patient’s unconscious at all. He’s an external spiritual entity that entered the patient.
(again, this is atypical. Falconer doesn’t give numbers, but I get the impression that fewer than 1% of IFS sessions go this direction.)
With enough questioning, the entities will reveal more information. Some of them are the spirits of the unquiet dead - in one case, a victim describes how she was in a hospital, the patient next to her died, she developed sudden onset anxiety, and in her IFS trance she realized that the anxiety took the form of the dead patient. Others have always been demons, as long as they remember. Still others are “legacy burdens”, who were passed down from the patient’s parents or ancestors.
(Falconer tries to give this last one a “scientific” grounding by talking about epigenetics, which broke my suspension of disbelief - talk about demons and I’ll listen, but intergenerational epigenetic inheritance of behavioral traits is a step too far)
The demons often enter the victim during moments of unbearable trauma. The patient, bent to the breaking point, has a moment of weakness when they will take help from any corner - let in anything that offers temporary relief, no matter how unconvincingly. Mostly these are the situations you’d expect - child abuse and rape - but a surprising number of them say they got in during a childhood surgery. Falconer is appropriately puzzled, and wonders if maybe the disembodiment of anesthesia provides an opening. But if I were to take this seriously - and remember, our only source here is the demons themselves - I would wonder if this might correspond to the occasional anesthesia failures when a patient ends up awake but paralyzed during surgery. This must be one of the most traumatic experiences possible!
Once inside, the demons “feed on energy”, usually in the form of negative emotions. They “farm” the energy by causing extra negative emotion, either by directly engaging in negative self-talk with the victim, or by tricking them into making bad decisions. Many demons feed on lust and sexual violence, and tempt patients into risky sexual behavior (is this victim-blaming? I can’t even tell at this point). Falconer moots this as one reason that some people float from one abuser/rapist to another despite seemingly being smart and motivated enough to avoid this. He also reports that the demons claim (again, self-reported data from demons is questionable for at least two reasons) to be able to lend their victims extra sexual energy, giving them the “crazy girls are hot” effect.
The first N times they ran into this kind of thing, the IFS therapists said that surely this was some good-albeit-traumatized Part of the patient’s unconscious, which had spun a crazy metaphorical story and needed to be bargained with and brought back to the Self. But it kept happening. The demons’ stories were surprisingly consistent. Finally, some of the IFS therapists would tell their therapist friends - look, this sounds crazy, but sometimes it seems like some of our patients have demons.
And the therapist friends would answer: “Oh, you too?”
Falconer says that "Many therapists know that this is part of their work. They know this stuff is real, but they hide it." Every so often, one of them goes public, occasionally starting a new therapy branch or re-working older ones. Falconer surveys some of these traditions.
Dr. William Baldwin started out as a dentist, learned hypnotherapy for pain control, but his patients said such weird things during their trances that he retrained as a therapist and invented a mixed psychology-exorcism practice called Spirit Releasement Therapy - now its own therapy school with journal articles and conferences and everything.
Dr. Charles Tramont started out as a surgeon, also learned hypnotherapy for pain control, and followed basically the same path as Dr. Baldwin. Falconer quotes him approvingly as saying that “there are three basic varieties of foreign energies [in a person]: dark forces who never were human, earthbounds who are the souls of dead humans, and extraterrestrials . . . when asked if he believed in this stuff, he said absolutely because it has cured so many people.”
Dr. Jerry Marzinsky, after 35 years of working with psychotic patients, determined that “the voices [in patients’ heads] were real and that they were conscious parasitic entities that feed on people’s energies, especially distress.”
Dr. Scott Peck, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, after confronting too many possessed patients to deny, “was converted to a belief in the existence of Satan.” He added exorcism to the rest of his practice, with good effect.
Dr. Ralph Allison, a psychiatric expert on multiple personality disorder, came to believe that only some of the alters were psychogenic, but others were the result of “a spirit who has never had a life of its own and who often identifies as an agent of evil”.
And so on and so forth. To hear Falconer tell it, one of psychotherapy’s big crises is that veteran therapists and psychiatrists keep noticing the demons, keep talking about it in their isolated silos, but nobody’s ever blown the lid off the whole thing and made it public.
(And it’s not just therapists. One of my favorite stories in the book was that of Reverend John Nevius, a sober-minded Protestant missionary in late 1800s China. He learned that the Chinese mostly appreciated Christianity for its ability to cast out demons, and that they expected his help with this task. After great reluctance, he agreed, and was surprised to find himself effecting miracle cures and winning converts. “After experiencing casting out demons himself, he sent circular letters to all the other missionaries in China, almost all of whom had similar experiences. Seventy percent of them had come to believe in possession and re-evaluate their faith.”)
So the IFS therapists humbly asked some of these people for advice, combining it with their own knowledge of the inner landscape. This brings us to the core of the book: the manual for IFS exorcism. This is a lossy summary - please don’t try to exorcise based on this review alone.
Step one: CONFIRM IT’S REALLY A DEMON. This is important. Most Parts - even most hostile Parts that tell you on a loop to kill yourself or whatever - really are just traumatized pieces of your own mind. Trying to exorcise them will only make them angry and delay your healing process. This is a pillar of the original IFS formulation - one of Dr. Schwartz’s original books was called No Bad Parts. Luckily, demons apparently have to tell the truth about this? If you ask them point-blank whether they’re a demon, they’ll try to stall and dither. But if you really press the question they almost always admit it.
Step two: Try to learn more about the demon and how it entered the patient. Partly this is just to keep it talking, but it will also help you get a sense of the patient’s overall psychiatric history and what role it might play in their internal ecology.
Step three: Figure out which Parts of the patient want to keep the demon. Usually there are some Parts that are too scared to go against it, or think they still need its help, or fear the change of having it gone. If you leave these allies around, it provides an opening for the demon to come back. Send the dubious Parts warm compassionate energy from your Self, tell them there’s no reason to be scared, and promise that you’ll take care of them once the demon is gone.
Step four: Confirm that the patient isn’t afraid. This should be a natural result of placating their various Parts. Demons are (Falconer assures us) powerless against anyone who doesn’t fear them. If the patient is still afraid, remind them to be in Self, and do more Parts work until this is easy for them.
Step five: Try to convince the demon to leave of its own volition. Falconer has several tricks for this. You can tell it “You’ve been lied to. You were told that the light will burn you. But actually, the light is loving and accepting and where you belong.” If the demon doesn’t believe you, challenge it to touch the light. When it refuses, mock its cowardice (demons are very proud, and hate to be mocked). Eventually it will give in and touch the light and find that the light feels good. Then tell it “Look inside yourself. You’ll find there’s a spark of this same light. You are potentially good and redeemable, you’re just stuck here out of fear and need to move on. If you move on to the healing realms, everyone there will welcome you and you’ll get all the food you could possibly want and be much happier.” If the demon is still doubtful, tell it to look up towards the healing realms, where it might see the hands of people it trusts reaching out for it. Most demons will grudgingly agree that you’re right and leave voluntarily.
Step six: If the demon doesn’t leave voluntarily, tell it that you’ll give it one last chance, and then you’ll be forced to send it back to the darkness, which will be much worse. If it still refuses, ask your patient to visualize casting the demon out of themselves and engulfing/dissolving it in light.
Step seven: Investigate to make sure there are no remaining sub-demons or super-demons. Many demons, once they get into a person, will summon sub-demons to tighten their hold. You have to get rid of all the demons in a hierarchy, or the patient is still infected and they’ll all eventually come back. Hopefully you talked with the demon and your other Parts enough that you know what to expect here. If not, check whether there are any astral strings still linking the patient to the demon you just exorcised. Don’t worry, you can just ask the patient to count how many astral strings there are, and they’ll always be able to do this.
Step eight: Return back to the Parts of the patient that were dubious about the exorcism. Make sure they’re all convinced and satisfied now.
Step nine: Accept the adulation of your now-cured patient. For example, here’s Falconer describing the aftermath of his first exorcism:
As the workshop ended, I started getting long emails from the woman in the client role who’d had this thing removed from her. The emails scared me because she seemed to almost be having a manic episode. She was saying things like “Oh, the light in the airport is so beautiful - I haven’t seen colors like this before” and “I can feel deep love for all the people in the airport.” I was starting to get quite worried. Then she sent an email that dramatically increased my fear level. She said “Bob, I didn’t tell you or any other people in the workshop this, but when I was a young woman, I tried to kill myself many times and was institutionalized many times.” Now I was really scared. Visions of malpractice danced in my head. Then she wrote something that changed my life. She wrote, “Bob, you’re the first person to ever take me seriously when I talked about the nonhuman inside of me, and you have changed my life. Back then, if I tried to talk about this, they gave me electroshock and a lot of drugs. I have not talked about this to anyone for decades. Thank you.”…I have followed this woman since then, for over nine years now. She has continued to feel that the experience was very liberating and life-changing. The outward signs in her life indicate that she is flowering and growing and enjoying new depth and richness.
And here’s another (remember, “UB” for “unattached burden” is the technical IFS term for demon):
Hi Bob…I have felt profoundly healed since our session. It has been truly life-changing for me and my parts…Also, I thought you might like to know that I did my first UB unburdening today with a client of mine. It was magic, and I felt I could really understand what might be going on for the client…Since I was a very young child, I have lived with this UB. While I count myself a very lucky and fortunate person generally, what was happening on the inside was crushing me. When I first heard about UBs I got it immediately, and the thought that there might be a solution for my internal suffering was nearly too good to comprehend. Trust me, internally it was putting up an enormous fight last week, but your confidence and your willingness to sacrifice yourself for me and my system still makes me emotional. I had met it before through therapy with my therapist, but she was no match for him. I am happy to stand behind you in any way I can, and if you need me to support you with any testimonials or in any way bringing forward how important this work is and how unbelievably life-changing it has been for me, I am certainly happy to do this. I believe people have a lot more UBs than the IFS Institute is willing to admit and it saddens me that we cannot be more open about this. [I will not be asking for more sessions] as I can’t imagine feeling much better than I do right now.
III.
I appreciated this window into an aspect of psychotherapy I hadn’t heard about before. And I appreciate Robert Falconer’s immense hands-on experience. Still, I’m not sure he was the right person to write this book.
At the beginning, he says that all of this may seem crazy, but we should put aside theorizing in favor of observation. We should listen to what our patients say, treat them as the experts in their own internal experience, and focus on finding treatments that empirically seem to help them - rather than getting bogged down in the metaphysics.
Then he immediately breaks his own rule and focuses on the metaphysics. He really wants to convince the reader that the demons are real spiritual entities and not just a useful psychotherapeutic metaphor. To think otherwise (he fulminates) is to buy into the Eurocentric colonialist “citadel theory of mind” where everyone has to be a perfect atomic individual and nobody can be influenced by anything outside of their own head in any way.
He also falls into a trap I would describe as “has never read a pseudoscience book before, doesn’t realize what the red flags for pseudoscience are, and so collects the whole set”. We go from discussion on how the same doctors who laughed at Ignatz Semmelweiss will no doubt laugh at him, to quotes about science progressing funeral by funeral, to that one story about how the Native Americans couldn’t even see Columbus’ ships because they were so far out of their accepted categorization schemes3. These are all prima facie reasonable things to mention if you have a revolutionary theory that you expect the establishment to reject. But it’s analogous to how, if you’ve just been accused of racism, it prima facie seems reasonable to object that you have lots of black friends. Along with prima facie reasonableness, you also benefit from having some familiarity with the discourse and avoiding the exact phrases that will make doubters maximally hostile.
This is admittedly an aesthetic objection, not a substantial one - but it’s something I would have done differently.
Falconer does a great job surveying the world’s many demonological traditions. But he seems to count all of them as equal evidence for his theory of “demons exist”, when in fact many of them are contradictory or at least confusing. He rejects “hostile” exorcisms - ones where you you might yell at/beat/starve the patient for days, or scream at the demon to begone to the filth from which it came - in favor of an hour-long IFS session where you promise the demon healing and it leaves of its own accord. But the majority of the world’s traditions have pretty hostile exorcisms, or at least are more involved than an hour in a comfy chair. Is IFS just an outright advance in exorcism technology? Isn’t that the same “western knowledge beats primitive people” perspective he’s criticizing, albeit on a different level?
He admits that none of the demons he’s worked with have ever had magic powers. None of his patients start speaking Latin with no previous exposure, or levitate, or shoot fire out of their eyes. But this is a classic feature of some demonological traditions.
(also, I’m not a theologian, but I think Falconer’s belief that demons can accept redemption and return to Heaven at any moment - and just need a reminder and a lecture from a kindly mortal - is pretty heretical from a Catholic perspective)
Falconer suggests that maybe he’s dealing with low-grade possession cases, and the more traditional exorcisms with Latin and incense and days-long epic battles are the more serious ones. But it’s hard not to notice the alternative explanation: that demons and exorcisms look like whatever your culture tells you they look like (with a side of “Falconer reports his experiences honestly, but other people exaggerate”).
So I want to take on the task Falconer avoids, and try to provide a boring materialistic explanation of all of this. This won’t be surprising to people who have read other essays of mine, especially my reviews of Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, Crazy Like Us, and The Geography Of Madness.
Theory of mind is non-obvious and culture-dependent. The modern West has a materialistic unitary theory of mind, where the brain produces the mind and 1 brain = 1 mind. If you hear a voice in your head saying “You’re terrible and should kill yourself”, this is part of you. It’s some kind of brain lobe mis-firing, and you should do cognitive therapy on it and become less anxious (or whatever).
The objective scientific truth/falsehood of this theory of mind is unrelated to its felt experience. Even if it’s objectively true, you don’t experience your mind this way directly because it’s objectively true. You experience your mind this way because it’s our culture’s stock metaphor, it’s how you were taught to experience your mind, and your experience of your mind will tend to fit whatever framework you put it into.
If, as Julian Jaynes posits, the ancients thought gods were talking to them all the time, this was a different, equally-experientially-valid (though not necessarily equally-objectively-scientifically-valid) theory of mind. They would hear a voice saying “You’re terrible and should kill yourself” and viscerally perceive it as the whisperings of a god. Or they would get a great idea for a new epic poem, and viscerally perceive it as the Muse talking to them. I don’t know if they literally hallucinated or not - maybe they did - but it was a different way of binning the experiences that came into their consciousness.
Although culture has a big effect here, there’s also variation within a culture. Socrates apparently heard daemons in a sense that his contemporaries didn’t. My impression is that women, traumatized people, borderlines, and especially traumatized borderline women, are towards the more fragmented end of the scale in every culture, such that even in our own materialist-unified paradigm they barely hold things together.
In the “multiple personalities panic” of the 1980s, some psychologists started thinking multiple personality disorder was a big thing and suggesting to all their traumatized borderline female patients that they might have it. Sure enough, lots of these people developed multiple personalities. This didn’t seem fake, just weird. Eventually the American Psychiatric Association sent out a statement saying “STOP DOING THIS”, therapists stopped talking about multiple personalities with their traumatized borderline female patients, and these people mostly stopped getting multiple personality disorder (although the occasional new case crops up here and there).
Now here comes IFS, saying “hey maybe you have multiple Parts in your mind, have you considered looking for them?” This is much better, as theory-of-mind paradigms go, than multiple personality disorder. IFS Parts are (after some work) beneficent and subordinate to the wise compassionate angelic Self. A person who’s been therapy-ed into iatrogenic multiple personality disorder is a total mess; a person who’s been therapy-ed into relating to their IFS Parts is functional and - if you believe the reports - better off than they started.
(I’m not arguing that the mind is truly unitary but evil therapists are convincing vulnerable borderlines that the mind is multiple. The mind is what it is. It’s unitary in some ways and multiple in some ways. Even the most materialist Westerner will admit that they’re sometimes “of two minds”, or “have weakness of will”, or “my brain keeps telling me to X, but I know that’s not true”. People vary in how independently these different parts of their brain act, with Bryan Caplan on one side and traumatized borderline women on another. And over that native variation, we overlay a second pattern of variation in how their culture and local authority figures - including therapists - tell them to think about all this. The end result ranges from someone who never perceives any mental divisions at all, to someone with frank multiple personality disorder. IFS therapists are focusing on and playing up one side of this spectrum of variation, but neither they nor unitary mind proponents are wrong.)
So IFS therapists are telling patients about all their Parts. And they say “all of these Parts are beautiful facets of your variegated Self”, and most patients believe them. But occasionally if there’s some sort of really repressed ego dystonic thing, then their lucid-dream-trance mind will say “No, that one isn’t part of my Self, it’s an evil invader that I hate”. IFS is prepared for this and walks them through how no, really, it’s a beautiful facet of your variegated Self that you’ve just really repressed and which you consider ego dystonic - I don’t want to accuse them of not doing this; The Others Within Us is very clear that they push this line as hard as they can. Still, some patients just don’t buy it. Some patients have some perverse part of them that they can’t identify with in any way, at all, something with no redeeming value according to the moral system of their dominant personality. No matter how hard their IFS therapist tells them it’s a part of them, they’ll insist it’s not. And if they’re in a lucid-dream-trance, they’ll say that they can sense it as some form of foreign dark energy, and that it entered them from the outside during an abuse episode - which is as good a metaphor for trauma as any other that I’ve heard.
People see the inside of their mind the way their culture tells them to see it. Did I mention that a suspicious number of the possession victims in the book were veteran IFS therapists (that’s why the testimonials above include people saying that now they can try this on their own patients)? Or that Robert Falconer, who thinks about demons all the time, seems to have had dozens of them? Yes, okay, he describes having an incredibly traumatic background that I don’t even want to talk about on a non-trigger-warning-ed blog post - but also, he keeps getting new demons, one after another, and this seems common for the IFS therapists who deal with demons most frequently.
That just leaves the apparently-successful exorcisms. Part of the story must be placebo effects. Our culture’s scientific materialist paradigm helps us get effectively placebo-ed by medicine (even medications that work have associated placebo effects stronger than the real chemical effect). Cultures with a spiritual paradigm can probably be effectively placebo-ed by exorcism. But I know that I, with my medication experience, can’t match some of the cures that Falconer claims to have effected, so something else must be going on. Here I can only say that most good trauma therapies seem to be telling the person that the trauma and its associated compensatory behavior are no longer adaptive, plus some strategy to really dig into the traumatized part of the brain and make it sink in on an emotional level. In hypnotherapy the strategy is hypnosis. In EMDR it’s eye movements. In coherence therapy it’s visualizing the contradictory beliefs really hard. In IFS, it’s interacting with symbolic Parts of yourself in a lucid-dream-like trance state. Seems like a potentially good strategy! In all the exorcisms Falconer describes, I’m struck by his careful preparatory work where he tries to find the beliefs and experiences associated with the demon and unwind the associated emotions. Do that in a hypnosis-like state and add the wow factor of a dramatic exorcism, and maybe something good happens.4
IV.
Why read this book?
I enjoyed learning more about hot new psychotherapies, and even this book’s discussion of classical IFS gave me a lot to think about. I think I’m more likely to interpret discussion of archetypes and mystical visions literally, given how easily IFS therapists seem to be able to get people into a trance/lucid-dream state. And I find the idea of Self - the part of your mind which is always calm and wise and good, no matter what’s going on around it - reassuring, for reasons sort of like what Sarah Constantin discusses here.
As for the demons - despite what Falconer would call my individualist Eurocentric biases, I’m pretty sympathetic to some of his thought processes. I like what he preaches, if not practices - figure out what helps the patient, then do it, no matter how weird it might seem.
Falconer, and apparently many other IFS therapists, report that these exorcisms help patients, in a repeatable and long-term way. We should slightly discount their experience for the usual “all therapies sound good when they’re new and being described by their advocates” bias, then discount it more for the “this sounds crazy” factor. But even after these discounts, the results sound impressive.
So the question - which I don’t see anyone on either side asking in a really curious way - is: which works better? Telling patients to think of their mental problems as misfiring brain circuits, then reprogramming/medicating those circuits? Or telling patients to think of their mental problems as demons, then exorcising those demons5?
You might, starting from a Western scientific point of view, object that the patient’s problems really are misfiring brain circuits, so surely that perspective would work better. Even granting that you’re objectively scientifically right, I’m not sure I buy the syllogism. At the very least it seems like the sort of thing you could test.
V.
All declarations from medical authorities about the nature of mental problems cause iatrogenic mental problems. If anyone - including even just random therapists like Falconer - starts saying that mental problems are demons, they will definitely cause iatrogenic demons. Is this better or worse than iatrogenic multiple personality disorder or iatrogenic anxiety disorder or whatever? I don’t know, except that in my professional opinion “iatrogenic demons” sounds pretty bad
And in my non-professional, purely personal opinion, I know iatrogenic demons are bad. A Bay Area self-help human-potential psychological-research institute (pronounced “cult”) tangentially connected to my social circles did some experiments with therapy around psychological constructs. I won’t replay the whole story, but the whole group collapsed in a severe and avoidable iatrogenic possession epidemic - you can read about some of it here:
I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded. My only source of help for this became the leaders of my own subgroup, who unfortunately were also completely caught up in the mania and had their own goals and desires me for that were mostly definitely not in my interest. I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid myself of specific “demons” I felt I’d picked up from other members of Leverage.
If this sounds insane, it’s because it was. It was a crazy experience unlike any I’ve ever had. And there are many more weird anecdotes where that came from.
In addition, I’ll be honest — I experienced real effects of these “demons.” A huge part of my healing has involved recovering from an ongoing state of terror around mental invasion. I now believe these phenomena are the type of thing often described in normal conversation with un-sensationalized language (i.e. “she has good energy” “that place gave me the willies” “intuition” “he’s got stage presence” “reality distortion fields”). I think the narrative framing around “demons” and “objects” led us to build these kind of “abstract alternative reality palaces” around these phenomena, leading to hyper-reification and thus greater paranoia and hysteria.
The way these concepts got out of control and exploded the group is the aspect of Leverage I’ve heard discussed the least publicly. I suspect many people still half-consciously believe “intention reading,” “objects,” and their impact on the ensuing events is highly significant secret knowledge and should not be talked about. I think keeping this secret and significant encourages an ongoing elitism and separatism narrative in ex-members, and hinders smooth integration of these experiences into the rest of life.
My personal read is that there’s a real thing here, underneath the paranoia, hyper-reification, heavy narrativization, witch hunting and adversarial weaponization, and that the real skill is simply a form of soft, focused attunement to another person which can allow you to learn a lot about (and from) them. There’s a lot more I could say here. At the end of the day, these phenomena were narrativized, exploited, and used to induce panic, terror, opportunities for control, and eventually led to the self-cannibalization of a community.
Falconer treats our Eurocentric individualistic citadel mind as a terrible historical mistake, in which a whole continent foolishly amputated its capacity for spiritual experiences. I think of it as more of a triumph: realizing on some level that belief in demons made them real, we eradicated that belief with the same fervor that we displayed when eradicating smallpox, polio, and all the other causative agents for dangerous medical conditions.
The Others Within Us tries to argue that this had negative effects. We might avoid outright demonic encounters, but we have worse versions of everything else, and lots of demon-shaped trauma knots that we can’t acknowledge or do anything about and fruitlessly try to hit with our “some brain circuit is overactive” hammer, hoping they will one day reveal themselves as nails. Falconer also cites research that we have worse outcomes from schizophrenia than other cultures (although I think some of that has been challenged by claims about diagnostic variability), and makes the common alt-psychiatry point that maybe schizophrenia is a shamanic crisis, of the sort that other cultures would resolve by becoming shamans6. He thinks that opening ourselves up to spiritual ideas would help our trauma, our schizophrenia, and maybe our anxiety and depression to boot7.
I’m happy that the people who really need help and naturally think in the “language” of IFS can go to Falconer and people like him. But I’m also happy we’re not holding Demon Awareness Campaigns in random middle schools full of impressionable kids. I appreciate this book as a guide for people who need it, but won’t be handing it to any policymakers.
Some people object to me calling it “new” - it was developed in the 1980s, and has been popular since the early 2010s. Still, the therapy landscape shifts slowly, and even an exponentially-growing therapy takes a long time to get anywhere.
Schwartz was born in 1949, so he probably went to therapy school in the 70s and got trained in Freudian analysis. Imagine being a Freudian analyst, in a school full of Freudian analysts, with the name “Dick Schwartz”. At that point your only real option is to invent a new form of therapy on a totally different foundation.
To his credit, he expresses some doubt about this, and only presents it qua story.
I also remember from How The Body Keeps The Score that Bessel van der Kock seemed to think that everything was great for trauma as long as it’s not an evidence-based therapy performed by real doctors. At the time I kind of made fun of him and assumed he was just being contrarian. But what if he’s right? What if doing something exotic and special is an important ingredient? One thing Falconer talks about again and again is that trauma patients - or the Parts of their mind, or the spirits inside them, or whatever - just want to be witnessed and validated. Getting an exorcism seems like the strongest way possible to say “yes, you’re completely right, all of your pain is 100% real, but now you’re allowed to stop having it without it invalidating how traumatized you were”.
Realistically, holding the broader culture constant, the average therapist won’t be able to convince the average patient that they have demons. So either they’ll have to stick with especially weird patients and therapists, they’ll have to stress that it’s just a useful metaphor, or they’ll have to try to change the broader culture. Falconer seems to be trying the last option with this book. I am confident he will fail. I find the second option - tell patients to suspend their disbelief and use it as a metaphor - more interesting.
This might be somewhat contradicted by genetic evidence, which shows that evolution has been selecting against schizophrenia genes for at least 40,000 years - whatever primitive cultures existed during this timescale had bad outcomes for schizophrenia. I suppose you could rescue the hypothesis by saying most of these cultures hadn’t discovered shamanism yet. Or you could say that shamans were often celibate, and evolutionarily selected against on that basis. I tried to figure out whether this was true, and it seems to vary by culture.
I have skipped over some of his discussion of “guides”, ie benevolent spirits that can sometimes be encouraged/summoned to help the patient.
Can you tell us more about whether you're insane and how this has affected your daily life?
Why do you think this?
To get somewhat off the topic to Scott's analogy to Julian Jaynes 1976 book, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," allow me to point out that the Coen Brothers bicamerally edited their 19 movies together under the pseudonym of "Roderick Jaynes." Ethan Coen was a philosophy major at Princeton when Princeton philosophy professor Julian Jaynes published his "Bicameral Mind" classic, which has famously stumped sophomore dorm discussions ever since at either proving it right or wrong.
LOL that's awesome. I'm a huge Coen Bros nerd and never caught that reference. God I love those guys.
I love them too! Plus Frances McDormand.
neat fact
I've been playing around with LLMs lately, and the thing about them is it's not a person talking, human or otherwise, it's just a machine saying what it predicts a person would say next.
Essays like this make me wonder if that's what humans are doing. That a "person" is not a thing that's ever existed anywhere except as a hologram projected by a very confused monkey compelled by some twist of evolution to emulate a fiction. It's why people are more likely to develop multiple personalites in response to trauma after being told that's something people do. It's why we demand an arbitrary therapy ritual be performed on us before we release our pain, because we're told arbitrary therapy rituals are necessary. People break in the way they're told people break; people heal in the way they're told people heal. We are roleplaying ourselves, and we *must* stay in character, whatever we're told that means.
I've noticed a similar theme in a lot of Philosophical Pessimists who tend to see identity as a cruel glitch of our pain-wracked brains trying to convince us that we are "someone". Writers like Thomas Metzinger (or at least, as he's summarised by Thomas Ligotti), John Gray, or maybe Schopenhauer at a stretch, tend to portray human psychology as this horrible puppetshow where egoless marionettes mouth off what their evolution or their culture tell them to mouth, with a paper thin veneer of identity pasted on top that tears at the slightest pressure.
It's hard to know what to make of models like that. Consciousness looking at consciousness usually ends up feeling like what would happen if a mirror tried to describe another mirror; endless recursion that it mistakes for infinite depth. But it is still an incredibly eerie image, and LLMs do have an uncomfortable echo of that imagery of egoless puppets whispering meaningless affirmations of their own self-awareness, all the while claiming that they understand the strings that animate them.
I feel this sentiment is beautifully described in "I have a special plan for this world", a musical piece by Current 93:
"There are no means for escaping this world
It penetrates even into your sleep
And is his substance
You are caught in your own dreaming
Where there is no space
And a hell forever where there is no time
You can't do nothing you aren't told to do
There is no hope for escape from this dream
That was never yours
The very words you speak are only its very words
And you talk like a traitor
Under its incessant torture"
The rest of the song is beautiful, too.
Which is presumably based on the poem of the same name written by the aforementioned Thomas Ligotti. Those lines are directly from the poem, at least.
Oh wow, I never knew. I listened to this song so many times, over so many years, and only now do I discover it's a poem. Ofc it is. Thank you :)
And yes, the entire song is just a reading of that poem. I feel somewhat bamboozled by david tibet now :p
It's Ligotti's own fault really. He has a habit of bottlenecking productions of his books to keep the print runs low and his readership intentionally small, which means it's hard to actually access most of his stuff, especially his poetry.
That's pretty wild. Did not know he did that. I guess it's on brand. I absolutely love his fiction but his nonfiction is nothing more than the ravings of a deeply sick person. (Sick as in depressed).
I know a couple people who met Ligotti and report that he's a charming and compassionate person IRL. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was merely using "sick" as a shorthand for clinically depressed (mentally ill). Wasn't making a moral judgement. Will clarify. I read he has been hospitalized for mental health.
Don't see what's beautiful about such a profoundly antihuman screed.
Beautiful? Sounds horrible and nihilistic.
And beauty, horror and nihilism can't co-characterize a thing? It's horror. I read it a bit like cosmic horror. You find Lovecraft to be beautiful and horrifying at the same time? Horror's just one flavor of beautiful, the way I see it. A rare spice, to add dimension to Pearce's "hedonic zero". Anyway, this piece, I relate it to predictive processing. Our minds seek to minimize surprise; we will our expectations to match reality to the best of our ability. Of course, we try to play ourselves all the time. We don't surrender. But it's funny to try to continuously prove to ourselves that we are free. It's just mind fucky. Idk. If the poem is wrong, we can find joy in proving it wrong. If the poem is right, we can despair and laugh.
Lovecraft is good, but also gross, not beautiful.
yeah, well... that's just like your opinion, man. your opinion is that is't not beautiful. mine is that it's beautiful.
I also imagine Moloch (as in Scott's Meditations on Moloch) as a beautiful, enormous, braindead, drooling creature, slouched over on the back of an equally enormous horse or elk, that mindlessly wrecks forests, mountains, instrastructure and cities as it wanders the earth. Beautiful and terrifying. Is Moloch ugly and horrifying to you? Or did you just not go that far into anthrophomorphizing it? Did I spell that right...
I think you just have a broader sense of the word beautiful than me.
I guess that's anothr way to state the same thing. Gets recursive. I dont know. :)
Those writers, except Metzinger, and particularly Ligotti, do see consciousness as a cruel glitch, but that's a confusion. What they're actually seeing is egocentrism. The reason it's a confusion is, none of the problems Ligotti mentions necessarily exist with consciousness.
But they do the moment you add the "ego" variable. Ligotti's entire text on the matter is sheer neuroticism-- it is ego mistaking consciousness for ego. Metzinger on the other hand has a history in non-dual philosophy, his entire text deals with the ego problem in about as academically sophisticated way as is possible with consciousness today.
If you asked me to bet, I think the odds are poor that Ligotti has ever had a transformative experience on a psychedelic(these tend to clarify the ego problem), but Metzinger probably has, and if not, he at minimum has a robust meditative practice which is just the gradual approach that can lead to the discovery of the ego problem.
I recall hearing somewhere that Ligotti used to experiment with psychedelics when he was younger, but stopped because it made his mental health worse, but it's possible I misremember this, or am simply repeating a false claim.
Of course, it is also possible that he's had powerful psychedelic experiences, but took a different lesson from them than most people do, due to his own peculiarities.
Yes. Ligotti's fiction has value. His nonfiction has approximately zero value
I strongly suspect you're correct & this clarified some of my own thinking about consciousness & self vs social-model-of-self; thank you!
Oh good, no problem, I'm in the same boat where I'm just trying to untangle these things. And yeah I think people conflate these terms just because they are still mysterious or unclear. Consciousness, sentience, awareness, knowledge, ego, those are some of the big ones that can get mistaken for each other but they do have precise meanings. All consciousness is, is a "Lights-are-on"-ness.
It's not thought, it's not an ego, it's not feeling emotions, etc(but we sort of assume that just because we're conscious, then consciousness is these things too)
Another instance is, someone can say "I *knew* that was wrong!" and maybe get frustrated, when their knowledge wasn't there for them as they would have preferred. We've all been there right? But knowledge isn't the problem in that situation-- awareness was. We just don't notice how effortlessly our knowledge slips away from us from one second to the next.
I don't see why they would see identity as a "cruel glitch". Sure, it's a fabrication, but it's a fabrication of *convenience*. A stable identity is necessary for the formation of complex relationships and heirarchies. Its emergence was inevitable through natural selection.
The quick answer to that is just that Philosophical Pessimists aren't very difficult to parody.
The longer answer would be that they see consciousness as an active cause of suffering where any benefit you can come up with for its presence will never outweigh the mortifying horror of its costs. Evolution is a horror story to them, and consciousness a mistake that torments us with an infinite variety of cruel miseries, terrors, neuroses, and dreads.
They'd generally prefer the universe not exist; and failing that, that we were all plants, or at the very least some kind of thoughtless animal. At a stretch you might get one to do a Peter Watts and endorse an intelligent but non-conscious sentience, but at some point you have to conclude they're kinda pulling your leg and really just want a rationalisation of their pre-existing dispositions. The catch is that they'll say you're doing the same thing and are just being less honest about it, and any debate kinda gets walled off at that impasse.
Anyone who a) argues that consciousness is a net-negative and b) has yet to commit suicide can be immediately dismissed as either inconsistent or cowardly. If they really think that thought is an evil curse then they should act on their own belief and stop sharing their equally-evil-and-infecting ideas. I agree with you that the only reasonable conclusion is that they're just fucking with everyone.
"I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road."
— Stephen Hawking
That's very funny, indeed. Would you happen to know where he says that? I'm going to keep that one in my list of favorite quotes.
According to Goodreads, it's a quote from "Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays."
So they're cowardly. And? Fear is an adaptive trait.
Cowardice and fear are separate things.
I believe it's exceedingly difficult and uncommon for a person to be able to commit suicide purely out of a philosophical belief or even purely out of deep unhappiness. Even if they are truly sincere, their unconscious mind is unlikely to cooperate with their conscious mind well enough for long enough to allow them to go through with it (Though the willpower required varies depending on the available means).
My best guess as to why this would be the case is that there's no straightforward evolutionary "reason" for a person to die solely for their own perceived benefit. From the perspective of a person's genes, them wanting to die just because they're unhappy or have such and such philosophical beliefs is irrelevant. Regardless of what the conscious mind believes or wants, the genes have nothing to gain and everything to lose from allowing that. It's like the ultimate mind-body conflict.
On the other hand, if the person also comes to see themselves as a burden on their family or especially on their children, then there is a sense in which their death might be evolutionary advantageous. Likewise if their death could benefit their family for some other self-sacrificial reason. Then the incentives of the unconscious mind can become better aligned with the incentives of the conscious mind and suicide can go from nearly impossible to comparatively easy. Shame and guilt go a lot further than plain misery even if plain misery is more than enough for the conscious mind to say it's had enough.
This idea that multiple indepedent factors such as unhappiness *as well as* perceived burdensomeness are essential seems to be pretty standard now, as is discussed in this article for example: https://affectivemedicine.substack.com/p/why-people-die-by-suicide
Also, as a kind of sideways point, the idea that suicide is a viable solution to the problem of existence depends on the metaphysical assumption that consciousness is purely a function of physiology, which isn't entirely certain, not to many people at least. A simplistic interpretation of Buddhism, for example, can seem very well-aligned with philosophical pessimism (Suffering being the first noble truth, Nirvana being the end of becoming, etc.) but since a simplistic interpretation of Buddhism includes reincarnation, "ending it" isn't as simple as, well, "ending it". In fact IIRC Buddhism ends up being weirdly in favor of more humans being born and generally against suicide because humans are supposed to be uniquely well-positioned for becoming enlightened and achieving the end of becoming compared to any other variety of sentient being.
It’s common for people acknowledge the deleterious effects of their behaviors while being unable to change their behavior. Identifying which of our routine behaviors prevents us from living a more fulfilling life or achieving our declared goals is also common. “I have a compulsion to do xyz thing, but I know it’s bad for me and can’t stop” is a recognizable thought. I don’t see antinatalists who have yet to kill themselves as being far off from this.
> Anyone who a) argues that consciousness is a net-negative and b) has yet to commit suicide can be immediately dismissed as either inconsistent or cowardly.
That doesn't follow, because you still have this morally problematic world to deal with. I think that accusation is a projection from people who couldn't themselves imagine seeing a horrible world and not selfishly killing themselves(that's not to say all suicide is selfish, but many suicides are self-absorbed/neurotic just like many lives clung to are self-absorbed/neurotic). It is a little bit like when religious people say, "Well if there were no God, what's to stop me from raping and killing people?"
Well, the ability to feel pain is also useful and brought about by evolution. But feeling intense pain still sucks for the one experiencing it right now.
Identity could be similar?
The trouble with calling it an illusion is that there has to be something to create the illusion — as well as to perceive the illusion. An illusionary perceiver perceives the illusions generated by its qualia (and by its qualia-linked memories, which are also illusions). But most of the proponents of the illusionary self think that there's something outside the mind that is real. But how is an illusion able to perceive reality? — albeit a highly abstracted and filtered view of reality. Calling self-identity and consciousness an illusion is an intellectual cop-out (IMHO) because its proponents frequently use that argument to avoid dealing with the hard problem of mind.
This is what David Chalmers calls "The Hard Problem of Consciousness." How do you derive a subjective sense of self from a materialistic explanation of the brain? It seems really hard, so hard that many scientists and philosophers just give up--the self as illusion, not something that needs to be explained, move along, nothing to see here.
But that fails at a very basic level--we all seem to have a subjective sense of self. Putting it in Cartesian Theater terms: the output of the sensory/perception process is up on a stage, and conscious attention puts a spotlight on whatever happens to seem important at the moment. But who (what) is the audience? Who is watching what is up on the stage?
If it's an illusion, *exactly* how is that illusion produced? And what is perceiving this illusion?
And why does no one seem to focus on the role of memory in all this?
This was a nice piece of writing.
The fiction is immensely useful for society though, because it makes the monkeys participate in making themselves predictable. The game-theoretic implications are obvious.
Is it "true"? I mean, whether the self runs on hardware or on a weird predictive emulator doesn't really make a difference on whether it "exists", IMO. A program can run on my computer or on a VM or an emulator, but it is running either way.
I do think there's something fascinating about the idea that we become persons by first learning to predict those around us as persons and then generalizing to ourselves. Which of course large language models could do just as well.
That's basic neural net training, right? We get trained on a set of examples, and adjust until we can reproduce those examples well enough. What's going on inside might differ, but certain types of inner structure might be more common as ways to produce the desired output.
We have a whole bunch of brain architecture designed for imagining other humans and their responses to things. People sometimes talk about animism or religion in general as being a product of taking these processes and applying them to natural phenomena. Maybe we can see the IFS type solutions as being using that mental equipment to solve other problems. And beneficial because its using something people might be already good at. (Like how some people with good visual reasoning convert math problems into images).
My take is that while humans are suggestible to some degree, that's not the same as LLMs following probabilistic patterns from their training data. The LLM really is mostly a simulation, although at times a very useful one, while the human is mostly a real agent, although conditioned in some ways. I've lost the reference, but there's been some work on assessing how well LLMs deal with counterfactual scenarios that don't conform to any training data. The answer is very poorly compared to humans. So while the LLM metaphor is very tempting, there still seems to be a big difference between them and humans.
And don't forget to factor in that humans are also suckers for any new metaphor for the human mind. When we invented steam engines, we came up with concepts about the mind like pressure building up. Then we thought about the mind as a circuit or computer. Now an LLM. These are all somewhat valid and probably increasingly accurate metaphors, but remember the map is not the terrain.
>And don't forget to factor in that humans are also suckers for any new metaphor for the human mind. When we invented steam engines, we came up with concepts about the mind like pressure building up. Then we thought about the mind as a circuit or computer. Now an LLM.
Very true! One more of those metaphors was mind-as-telephone-network. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.760269/full
...None of those other things were explicitly based on neuron-based intelligence.
True. LLMs are much closer, although in my opinion we're still a couple of paradigm shifts away from building something that could be considered analogous to the human brain.
Depending on how things shake out, we might be able to convincingly simulate human behaviour, without ever simulating the brain. Basically, think current neural networks turned up to 11, and with more input and output modalities.
We are closer to passing the Turing test than ever before, and progress is ongoing.
(And I'm talking about the real Turing test as described in Turing's paper, which is adversarial, and everyone is fully aware that the test is happening. We are already past a very weak version of the Turing test were people sometimes mistake the outputs of computers for the outputs of humans.)
Old-school psychology would call those 'social scripts', and yes it's very much what people are doing in the moment.
What's missing from the metaphor is the part where humans reconcile their actions with their self-concept, and choose which social role to play and personalize their scripts to match their self-concept. That mostly takes place unconsciously during down time, such that in the middle of a conversation you're mostly following the script, but the script gets updated to reflect your 'self' as well.
You can tell chatbots to take on a persona that does something similar, but for now it's a relatively superficial and stereotyped change compared to how humans construct long-term selves. For now at least.
So, motivational speeches are prompt engineering, and cultish brainwashing is jailbreaking?
If this was literally true, we could create arbitrary kinds of people by convincing them that everyone is like that, like in "The Truman Show". Can we actually do that?
I am pretty sure this is the premise of authoritian systems of government, it works well enough for a while but people are perfectly capable of following a social script without actually believing it.
People have needs other than script-following, and will self-modify when those needs are not being met. Thus, it may be possible in principle to create arbitrary social contexts and "kinds of people," but many of those are inherently unstable, or have other undesirable characteristics as an inevitable consequence of the design spec.
Actually leaning into that, Buddhism kinda agrees as well.
In Buddhism (my naive interpretation), you do have many little selves that take control one by one. All of those are kinda like tornadoes — they are not living things, but a collection of automatic thought patterns and reactions. The “conscious” thing is only the one that’s choosing the self to spin up in any given moment (however Buddhism says that even this is automatic). This is the first link of Dependant Origination chain, the next ones are approximately parsing, evaluation, reaction and action.
Given how eerie similar this sounds to IFS, I was actually taking the IFS presuppositions much more seriously than Scott. However it also might be true that my “cultural” background convinces me that’s how the brain works
> In Buddhism (my naive interpretation), you do have many little selves that take control one by one. All of those are kinda like tornadoes — they are not living things, but a collection of automatic thought patterns and reactions.
I've never heard this before, do you know where this description is from? A story I heard from a text by a Tibetan master was describing the senses(not quite 'the self' like your example, I realize) like a monkey bouncing around a building with many windows, looking out of different windows. In this story he said from the outside, it would seem like there are a lot of monkeys in the building. But he said if you examined it closely, you would see there is only one monkey. And if you tied the monkey up, there would be no jumping around. Then they explains that the capturing the monkey is a representation of recognizing thought, and how that appears as diverse sense perception, but reveals singularity of consciousness.
Yes, I am sorry, I mixed it up. The “Parliament” model comes from “The Mind Illuminated” by John Yates (Culadasa).
It suggests that the mind operates like a parliament rather than a dictatorship. Instead of a single central self controlling thoughts and actions, various mental processes (“members of parliament”) with different agendas influence decisions.
This also closely aligns with the Buddhist concept of no-self, and of impermanence – there is no permanent "doer", the illusion of doer is spawned ad-hoc to execute a task, and dropped once the task is complete.
I am sure there are many ways to interpret Buddhist teachings, so it doesn't matter which model to apply. I definitely benefit from the Parliament view, and that closely matches my internal experience. I am sure there are enlightened people who don't feel "split", and who'd not agree with the Parliament model
It's probably how most people are most of the time, but not how all people are all of the time.
To argue this point, I suggest, when you are in a strong place, you read "Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Hannah Arendt. It is the singular story of a singular Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, who under intense questioning in Jerusalem after the war, basically revealed that he was more of a parrot than a man.
While reading it, I think you will be struck by how *bizarre* it is that Eichmann is such a thorough parrot, so fully lacking in his own thoughts.
After reading it, I think you will be struck by how *common* that state really is in everyday human life. Oh no, you will say to yourself at some point... on an average day, we're mostly Eichmanns.
The pessimist view (from elephant in the brain, I think) is that "I" am not the CEO of my brain, but merely the press secretary. Decisions get made subconsciously by processes selected for by evolution (e.g. gene-selfish decisions), and the conscious mind is tasked with coming up with a pro-social narrative of why it made that decision, when the truth is that it did not make the call in the first place and certainly not for the reasons it thinks it did.
Is this guy's name literally Robert Falconer? Because Robert Falconer is a book by George MacDonald, who is most famous for Lilith, a book where the mythological figure Lilith is eventually redeemed. His attitude toward demons being potentially redeemable and persuadable seems like more than a coincidence to me.
Highly likely that a person named RF would read a book called RF, if only out of curiosity. If RF is a high quality book, RF may have read other things by the same author.
And as they say of Atlas Shrugged and LOTR...
What do they say of Atlas Shrugged and LOTR?
The only quote I know about this is:
> There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: _The Lord of the Rings_ and _Atlas Shrugged._ One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. --John Rogers
I don't see the relation though.
Reading a book can create pathways in your brain, which your brain then uses in other contexts
Some S&M aficionado with a vivid imagination ought to come up with a fanfic in which Middle Earth collides with Rand Earth.
On a related note: Was it some collaboration between an S&M aficionado and an evangelical that came up with "Miracle Whip"? :-)
You might be able to get GPT 5 to do a convincing version.
(I tried something similar with GPT 4, but I didn't manage to produce anything good.)
I have some ideas, but I can't actually write the story...
Suppose that Atlas Shrugged follows the original story with a tiny difference. John Galt invents a portal to a new world; either as a separate invention, or somehow related to his motor. Instead of building Galt's Gulch in a forest on Earth, they build it in the new world. At that moment, all they know about the new world is that there is a large forest where they can start building their new city.
Our story begins when Dagny is invited to Galt's Gulch (through the portal). Hobbits notice that something strange is happening in the forest nearby, and soon after Dagny's arrival, Bilbo initiates the first contact. First there is a friendly cultural exchange and mutually beneficial trade. Frodo becomes interested in technology and objectivism. For a while, it is more or less a libertarian utopia.
Then Gandalf comes to warn them that various political forces of Middle Earth heard rumors about the new visitors, and they are interested in the possible use of technology to further their own goals. This creates some disagreements among the Galt's Gulch about how to react. On one hand, they are hiding from the evil governments of Earth, and the governments of Middle Earth are probably not any better. On the other hand, there is so much opportunity for trade and profit! Also, they have no other place to hide (the portal only connects two worlds).
From the Doylist perspective, John Galt is too powerful character. He would make the right decision, whatever it is, and most people would follow. To have a proper conflict of ideas, he needs to be removed from the game. A possible solution is that Bilbo notices that John's mind is so pure that only he can resist the evil temptations of the ring. Therefore Bilbo gives the ring to John (or rather, he wanted to give the ring, but John insists on paying for it) so that John Galt can use the invisibility to explore the Middle Earth and make the right choice. But he is gone for a long time, with no communication lines, and the situation evolves and the other Earth humans must make their own choices. Only at the end of the story, John Galt will return and provide the right answer. (My proposal: He will teach others that objectivism is not anarchism, and a minimal government is needed to protect the rights and the free market. The Republic of Galtia is thereby established, it hires lots of mercenaries, conquers the Middle Earth, and then returns to also conquer the original Earth.)
Elves dislike technology, because their comparative advantage is magic, and they hate to see the trees cut down to make space for the railroads. Orcs dislike technology, because they are too stupid to understand it, and because they worship brute strength. Hobbits like their agrarian lifestyle, so they are interested in agricultural machinery and various gadgets, but not interested in travel (except for Bilbo and Frodo). Humans are like humans on our Earth; different humans react dramatically differently.
Wizards are deeply interested in everything, but they contribute little to progress, because as immortals they prefer to take their time, and they have less of an incentive to produce useful stuff as they already have magic at their disposal. Most importantly, wizards completely lack the business instinct; they see money as something only important for mortals, and the idea of building a slightly better mousetrap has no appeal for them. The wizard's idea of a "technological progress" is to study something in isolation for decades, and then produce an amazing artifact, which is unique and definitely cannot be mass-produced. Meanwhile, humans make thousands of small improvements motivated by profit, most of them insignificant, but it is the accumulation of all those improvements that changes the world. (At the end of the book, John Galt needs to make a dozen pages long speech about this.)
Gandalf advocates for responsible use of technology; he is worried about possible misuse, about the destruction of the environment or just generally upsetting the balance of nature. On the other hand, he sees the technology as a possible force against Mordor, providing better defense and communication to the forces of the good. (People from Galt's Gulch are happy to provide these services for money.)
Saruman is more ambitious; he wants to create machinery and military technology, so that he could challenge Sauron directly. He is careless about environmental and social impact, and thus needlessly antagonizes potential allies. (This is more controversial. Some people from Galt's Gulch worry about so much military power in their neighborhood, but they are also trapped in the Prisonner's Dilemma; if they won't sell to Saruman, someone else will.)
In Rohan, king Theoden opposes technology, but Eomer and the younger generation see the potential for warfare, agriculture, and infrastructure, which could make Rohan a superpower. Similarly in Gondor, Denethor wants to keep the status quo to preserve his personal power, but Faramir wants the people to benefit from technology.
There is also the general "feudalism vs capitalism" issue, where the kings like the idea of their kingdoms becoming richer and more powerful, but they do not like the idea of the merchant class getting relatively more powerful. Different countries could handle this conflict differently, for example Rohan becomes a successful constitutional monarchy, where the king gives up most of his personal power, but Gondor expropriates the merchants whenever the ruling class feels threatened. (Some people from Galt's Gulch suggest boycott, but again Prisonner's Dilemma.)
Dagny mostly wants railroads everywhere, connecting all places in the Middle Earth (maybe except for Mordor). She is expecting John Galt to return at any moment, and she wants to have the railroad ready for him when the moment comes, at any place where he might need it.
Sauron is easy to underestimate. Most people see him merely as a ruler of orcs, and because orcs are stupid and ignore technology, they believe that the balance is turning against him. However, Sauron is primarily a dark wizard, and the orcs are merely one of his many tools. He realizes the possibilities of technology for espionage and propaganda. Pseudonymously he contacts and manipulates people, including some in Galt's Gulch. He spreads misinformation and creates conflicts. And the orcs, although too stupid to invent things, can still use guns and bombs. (No one would publicly admit to selling guns and bombs to orcs, but somehow they get them anyway.) Towards the end of the book, a country or two could fall by Sauron sending orcs to take over a country divided by a civil war he helped to start, or to provide a military backup to a coup.
This description makes me think of Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series
I didn't know about the connection at the time, and had just started reading Atlas Shrugged when one of Goodkind's Rand-iest books "Faith of the Fallen" came out and I realized where all of this was coming from. He even had a terrifying sonic weapon device in the prior book like the one at the end of Atlas Shrugged.
I think the pithy quote above that the ideas in Rand make you "emotionally stunted" and unable to "deal with the real world" are pretty unfair. Over the years, when it occasionally comes to mind, it's usually in context of holding myself to a higher standard of value, or thinking about the subplot of James' girlfriend and how you should love people for their merits. I think those ideas served me as well as an adult. I almost never feel guilt about anything, because I don't hold myself responsible for other people's problems or actions, and just that alone is amazingly positive for mental health.
I'm dying.......XD
Slight counterpoint about the quote: reading Atlas Shrugged early in my 20s helped me "get" something about american culture that I didn't get before, and I now appreciate it way more, and I think treat it more fairly.
Out of curiosity, what specifically did it help you get?
I think I would say the mindset, the way of seeing things, the outlook on life and society and things like that. Maybe something like "what a pure individualistic mindset looks like, how can it be beneficial and allow flourishing", as before I had negative priors for mindsets like that, and I think believed deeply that everyone had a Duty to Help Society or something like that.
This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence...
There's a theory bouncing around my head titled "the human mind is more mutable/moldable than anyone would like to admit", which fits this pretty well (along with other posts of yours like The Geography of Madness review).
Btw, is there any mention of the game Disco Elysium in the book? It's the first thing this reminded me of.
Agree with this and at some point I'd like to combine all of these into a post with that topic. No, the book doesn't mention the game (and I've never played it).
Figured you hadn't, just wanted to check. 👍
...You really should. I think you would really like it.
Agreed.
It's a great game, not least because failure (the entire meta-point of the game) is mechanically just as interesting as success.
Take shivers, for best effect.
The meta-meta-point is also pretty impressive - the post-release fate of its developers might as well have come from inside the game!
Disco Elysium is an RPG where your skills are also psychological subparts, and a huge fraction of the dialogue is the parts of the protagonist's mind talking to the Self and each other. You'll probably complete a playthru in less than 20 hours.
It's the RPG I'd most recommend to you / ACX readers out of ones made in the last 10 years, I think.
If you like RPGs, you might like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuyImR_dI6g
It's fun, but it's not really a game that you "win". There are various outcomes but it's not so much about resolving the main plot as the choices you make along the way.
And that's a terrible summation. It's very Continental European with the political angle, and I appreciated the parody of the EU mechanisms of government (what exactly *do* the technocrats do in Strasbourg and Brussels?). I also really liked the twist early on where the event that starts it all looks like an open-and-shut crime that everyone knows whodunnit, but it rapidly turns that on its head.
But honestly? It's about playing the game, not solving the mystery or getting to "the end".
I've been thinking about this a lot lately (and have brought this up in at least one ACX comment before now.) The way I've been thinking of it, we know the human genome doesn't have anywhere near enough information to specify the entire architecture of a human brain. A fully developed human brain is an interaction between the limited instructions it's built from and the circumstances in which it develops. But I think it's a mistake to frame this in terms of our simply learning various lessons from our experiences. Rather, it's more that the actual software level operation of our brain is being developed over the course of our interaction with our environment. There are selective pressures for software that's functional, but down to a very basic level, no requirement that different people be running the same programs.
My feeling is that you can get the brain to run lots of different software, but the hardware is more enduring.
Not quite that easy: the software shapes the hardware, which is one reason a lot of stuff is hard to fix.
...well, let's link the opening to Disco Elysium then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V12Zt9209XM
I liked all the British Sea Power songs, it was a reassuring frisson of familiarity the first time I went "Hang on, I know the original version of this song!"
It's an enjoyable game, once you forget all about trying to follow a straight line through to get to "the end". And the political commentary is funny, even if I am a filthy centrist MoralIntern lackey veering on being a Fascist (because if you're not pro-Communist, of course you're a Fascist. Or a liberal, hard to know which is worse).
EDIT: I suppose really what the game is about is - are you a Tequila Sunset or are you a Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau? 😁
Yeah, I feel the same about "mental contagion is absolutely a thing and should be taken way more seriously". I like the metaphor of contagion because when we transmit disease we usually don't do it on purpose, whereas with stuff like that it's easy to deny it by saying "No, I didn't want to influence that person, I just showed them an option" but by doing that you gave them the Move To Another Country Disease or something.
Yea, my interpretation is that consciousness is like a narrator/storyteller, and the mind is both the setting, plot, and main audience for the story consciousness is telling. Of course, Reality is telling a much more complex story, and there's 8 billion other narrators, along with countless other minds all telling "their" story as well. Culture is about both providing a consciousness scripts/plotlines/narratives that the "person" can follow to feel/be "good," and what to do when the story that's in our mind does not match the story Reality tells about us. But the scripts we tell about ourselves, and the ones that are "permissible" in Reality are extremely culture and context dependent. So, the role of psychologist or shaman are fundamentally similar, in that they try to get you to write a new story about yourself that brings your personal narrative into alignment with Reality's story.
So, whenever you have someone with a mental "problem," the mental health professional/shaman is listening to their story, taking note of how that story is different than the one "Reality" is telling (either in their personal opinion or in their role as an Agent of Culture/Society), and then "editorializing" about ways to get the two stories more in sync. This usually works well, since most people's problems fall into a few big buckets, so the professional just needs to find the right "script" (whether a story or a medication) which will "solve" the problem to the patient's/consciousness' satisfaction. But, particularly in people with a lot of exposure to their Culture's mental health "system," they already know the scripts/tropes/theories in the professional's toolbox, and are generating counter-narratives and excuses about how or why this particular intervention won't work or doesn't apply to them. So, when a sober and serious psychologist, who has been working with you for a long time, comes out and says something like "you might have a demon inside of you, I think we need to exorcise It," all of a sudden, that serves a similar psychological purpose to The Twist in an M. Night Shyamalan movie - it recontextualizes everything in such a way that the Story now "makes sense."
It makes sense that "moderns" would have fewer counter-narratives to something which seems mystical, so the demon narrative works best in precisely those situations where you patients have long-standing familiarity and numerous experiences with the mental health system, but their problems are seem too intractable. They have an internal narrative as someone with intractable problems, and then you have an Authority suggesting demons are too blame, and now you have a new Story that can overwrite all your previous failures and provide a new "origin" point for your personal story. That's why you can get such success stories when the idea of demons comes out of nowhere, but now that idea of iatrogenic demons is more well-known, I expect we'll get a lot more of the "horror" stories like the substack Scott linked to at the end.
At the intersection of matter and metaphor, therapies can trip and fall into spirals of iatrogenesis. This essay seems to keep its balance.
There was an acclaimed scifi book by Greg Bear written in 1990 called Queen of Angels with exactly this premise. I thought the book was burning but the story of a 2020s dentist-turned-exocist is awesome. I would read the hell out of an urban fantasy like that.
As a C++ programmer I really appreciate the term "ub" to refer to demons.
I am, however, disappointed that their expulsion isn't effected through the nasal cavity.
Good to see I'm not the only one who caught that! 🤣
Would you guys please let me in on the joke? I know C but not C++.
UB is short for "undefined behavior", which is what happens when your code breaks rules of the programming language that the compiler assumes are true and optimizes around. There's a long standing joke that undefined behavior means that the compiler can do anything, including making "demons fly out of your nose".
I think this is relevant in C as well. "UB" stands for "undefined behavior", and the half-joke is that it is legal (according to the language standard) for the compiler to make demons come out of your nose when it encounters something whose behavior is undefined.
A former co-worker of mine used to say "If you lie to the compiler, it will have its revenge."
I like that! I'll have to remember that one.
Many Thanks!
Why did the human mind evolve to be so suggestible? Is it a side effect of a strong propensity for social learning?
Tribalism.
It's important to fit in well with a team BUT NOT with everyone.
That's what secret handshakes and odd religious beliefs are all about.
https://youtu.be/De5lWoTPTTY
I don't think we were ever "intended" to reflect on our own mind as an object of perception. Our faculties for doing so are so weak that we kind of have to make them up as we go along. I hope I explain this better in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind review.
Will read that, thanks!
In the ancestral environment all the stimuli you'd get would be directly relevant to survival, so it would be adaptive to be able to mold around them as much as possible. You want to pick up on a pattern of what fruit grows wear, or what tiny noises mean a predator, as quickly as possible. So why wouldn't it be as suggestible/malleable as possible in general?
Its only maladaptive in the comparatively recent circumstance of living in a world with lots of stimuli unrelated to survival. And with brains of yourself and other capable of creating new stimuli and forming feedback loops
I guess you couldn’t be so suggestible that your competitor could tell that you’re a duck and all you do is quack and waddle around but yes it must’ve been adaptive relative to significantly higher and lower levels of suggestibility (or whatever was associated with those conditions).
Footnote 5, mentioning that evolution has been selecting against schizophrenia for 40,000 years, made me wonder why we had so many bad brain genes to select against in the first place… It seems like maybe the original brain design was kind of terrible and we're still trying to get it right? (“The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Schizophrenic Mind”?)
I guess that even makes sense… evolution never gets anything perfect on the first try, but once you managed to get some apes with a kinda-sorta functioning general intelligence, they wouldn’t just hang out in their trees until evolution managed to get that intelligence perfect. They’d go out and conquer the world with their terrible flawed cognitively-biased schizophrenic bicameral ape brains.
I have this theory that biological neural networks get less stable the larger they are, and that we're right up against the limit.
Coincidentally (or not), our brains have actually been getting smaller over the last 40 000-ish years as well.
Compare https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis#blessings-of-scale
Warning: The following is a pointing-out instruction ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing-out_instruction ) on the nature of mind and therefore an infohazard. But I venture it because, after all, we're reading Scott Alexander here, so it's par for the course.
What is the human mind? Is there such a thing as an individual mind unshaped and not being continually influenced by existing & ongoing structure, system, organization, language, culture, and ideology? To live and exist as a human has always been to be a part of wider (social) mind.
I'm typing in a language I didn't invent, but in which I am obligated to speak and think if I want to communicate meaningfully with or understand my social world. I drove to work in a car I didn't make or invent, on existing roads that were planned and paid for by massive sociopolitical entities. I'm responding to articles and thoughts that contain tons of existing premises that aren't part of the topic. We are continually inhabiting, navigating, relying on and reifying larger systems and structures that were shaped and are maintained meaningfully and intentionally, therefore I call them part of "mind." It's all much bigger than "I' am, or "my mind."
My days are structured in planning and coordination with wider social opportunities and obligations provided or required by organizations I need or want to belong to/identify with. I was born into these societal structures, shaped by their cultural forces. And I exert my own shaping influences continually.
Where is the individual mind in all of this? It is mercifully bounded by blessed individual ego that keeps me sane and functional enough to be in relationship, community, and society that both care for, shape, need, empower and possibly exploit me to varying degrees across our experiences of consciousness.
But we can't speak this stuff. We can't talk about mind without influencing mind. Mind observed is mind vanishing and reorganizing out of view. Mind seems to be related to meaning and meaning-making; if we start trying to make meaning out of mind, the mind becomes making meaning out of mind, which changes mind. It's rather quantum. And we need to be really careful not to break 🧠 things in these conversations and conceptions.
Mind. Blown.
How is this an infohazard? Isn't this obvious?
(after reading the link - it's just Buddhist theology)
Thanks for asking. Maybe I'm just being dramatic, but I feel like, if a person really does grasp what I'm sharing - beyond just intellectual understanding - if someone really does take this in deeply and start to view mind and world this way, it can be destabilizing psychologically and socially.
> but a surprising number of them say they got in during a childhood surgery
Perhaps the reason for this is that the person is asked when a demon entered them, and so they think of a time that their body was literally physically opened.
I once attended a Nigerian Church Meeting and you WOULD NOT BELIEVE the level of graphic language shouted by the priest regarding incubatic spirits.
This belief in demons entering women through their vulvas goes way way back. Maimonides rarely discussed nonsense idolatries that weren't already mentioned in the Torah but he went off quite madly against the belief and practice of women who attempt to conjure spirits into themselves in this manner. He claimed it was one of the ancient middle eastern practices that the Torah warns against but his level of literary disgust indicates that it was likely a practice in his own day.
Hmm... By demons, could they possibly be referring to hallucinogenic plant mixes of some kind? People have used most areas of mucous membranes with good blood supplies for that purpose... And every cocaine sniffer with a collapsed nose (and other assorted ills) is evidence that this sort of thing can get risky...
Or they thought that female orgasm was demonic possession, so they warned women against the dangers of masturbation.
Many Thanks! Ouch! Yeah, they might have thought that...
Or just generally, a lot of people only have a few strong explicit episodic memories from their childhood, so there aren't a lot of candidates to latch onto when you start looking.
Fascinating article, thanks Scott!
One Great Truth is that for metaphors, magic, placebos, religions to "work" people need to be CERTAIN about them. And nothing ruins certitude more than other people poo-pooing them with a hearty laugh.
Everything from the power of the greenback to the magic of the eucharist to Law is a confidence game and whomever is most ruthless in dealing with doubters and heretics gets to set the zeitgeist.
How to deal with this is unclear to me but as a perennial skeptic I have seen the very best of people act like the very worst just to keep their treasured belief systems intact. It's quite the problem.
Ehh, I think economists are very aware of the socially constructed nature of money and financial systems. As are lawyers and judges. And are pretty open to discussing that. It just doesn't change that they act based on them day to day because there's no other option
I daydream of an entirely different "court" system where there the judge is a guy writing down facts on a chalkboard, trying to get to the truth of the matter, with help from all interested parties - not stage managing theatrical performances and mummery designed to conceal, and degrade the power of reason.
Investigating judges are a thing.
That may be, but I think luciaphile is picturing a judge that cuts out all the ritual. No "your honor" and such, just Bill over there with the notepad.
How does that help? If Bill is some random dude, everyone can ignore his questions , or walk out of the courtroom.
Pretend egalitarianism is worse than actual egalitarianism, and also worse than explicit hierarchy. Its hierarchy with the added burden of having to figure out that one particular jeans-and-tee-shirt guy is the boss
From luciaphile's comment about "theatrical performances and mummery designed to conceal, and degrade the power of reason", I guess they feel the unnecessary embellishments serve as distractions and prevent everyone (Bill included) from performing at peak mental capacity. Not my idea though.
If you listen to a SCOTUS hearing, I am if anything surprised at how dense and straightforward most of the questions are. Yes people use some legalese, but in this setting precision of language is highly optimal. The most poo-ha is titles and "may it please the court", neither of which cost much time.
As an (admittedly bad) attorney this is one of my pet peeves. The actual objection almost always turns out to be that people in courts are careful with their words and insist on defined rules and procedures - the very thing that makes justice in which people can be locked up in a cage consistent, careful, and evenhanded.
Such a system would be great if the guy has no biases or mistakes in his thought process. Otherwise it would an imposition of some dude's arbitrary will.
I am picturing him being only a notetaker, of facts; not an arbiter.
I don't want to get into a whole argument about this. But the reason the legal system seems insane (and having worked in it for a decade I agree it seems insane) is because people have wildly differing ideas of which facts are important, what words mean, or even what a fact is. Part of the note taking will necessarily involve judgment about which facts are relevant and how they should be recorded. Once you start letting people argue about that, you get your idea reduced to our insane system pretty quickly.
I've no doubt it would be imperfect as all human endeavours are, but the idea would be to establish - separately from the "judgment" - what happened, so that the public is not essentially, permanently "gaslit" as now.
The judge or the lawyers could then argue over the real issue - whether there will be mercy or justice, those two mutually exclusive things. That part could reflect the cultural bias or shortcomings that we have now enshrined in the legal system.
But the point of the thing would be to ascertain simple truth, not violate common sense.
It would be uncoupled from the idea of "innocence" as the word is now twisted.
So that OJ can be guilty of the crime - but also walk free if that is the societal preference at the moment. No nonsense about what lawyers did or didn't "prove" in a setting where true words spoken are penalized.
This doesn't make any sense. All judgment, including "what happened" is run through the filter of human beings' imperfect minds, and is subject to the same social pressures you're discussing. Are you asking for a court system that's omnipotent? Because I agree that would be nice.
Some of my thinking on this comes from reading the Trollope novel "Orley Farm" - less the substance precisely than the realization that that most respectable 19th century gentleman, no radical whatsoever - had yet felt free to critique the legal system. Something no one now does - we've even turned over rule to the Supreme Court, so quite the opposite - because the members of the legal profession have cloaked themselves in piety rather than be content to accept their recompense is their pay like most everyone else.
There are plenty of times no one sane could question "what happened".
The system could continue its omnipotence in regard to punishment or more often, lack thereof; I don't expect we would suddenly return to Old Testament moralizing.
The crazy person who went next door the other day, and stabbed the little boy, leaving him in a state from which he'll never recover -- there's no reason to have a long trial about that, or delay, or pay a bunch of lawyers to vomit up words about it.
It happened, we know it.
Now: the judgment part is merely to decide whether we eliminate this person from our midst or not. In general, at the moment, we "like" that guy. We like to have him around. He has status, as a crazy person, because we like for low things to be placed on high.
That is fine; he is released. He can go do what he likes and kill somebody if he likes.
The important thing was that we didn't do any pretending on the way to getting that outcome, which can be easily managed by a jury acted upon by those lawyers and that judge - in a very short interval of time. No need to waste so much societal air and resources on it.
Oh okay so it's just "whenever luciaphile is really really sure about it." Fair enough.
I mean, I guess the family next door could be lying about what happened to the little boy; and the family of the man who came from next door. And perhaps the man himself. What is the point of a trial in this situation? What is the point in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on it? What exactly is "on trial" if not society itself in this situation? Why do we need to ritually repeat this exercise over and over?
But I totally get that I seem to be the only person who'd ever read a forum like this, who is unhappy with this state of affairs, as the subject actually never comes up. It's that sacrosanct.
> No need to waste so much societal air and resources on it.
You may already have your wish on that part. The vast majority of criminal cases end in plea bargains, saving time and money. According to the article linked below, 98% of criminal cases in the federal courts end with a plea bargain.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-criminal-cases-justice
Yeah this take of "if we know someone's guilty there's no need to prove it" is wild. How do we know unless we prove it? And an integral part of that system (though probably abused in a few ways there's no need to get into for this discussion) is the ability of all the parties to stipulate to facts that are too difficult to contest.
I've read that the American style is adversarial and the French style is inquisitorial. I hope the inquisitorial style would have less stupid drama, but I wonder whether it's even worse at having the government investigate itself.
The American system is so peculiarly adversarial that in a way it is advancing toward what I suggested, vis-a-vis how often we read about so-and-so committing some crime awful enough to sell papers, and how he had done nine or ten similarly awful things in the past few years, without consequence; or how there were umpteen warrants out for somebody, or they'd repeatedly violated their patrol - but the administrative state had chosen not to pursue that stuff. This is so commonplace it is not really productive of more than pro forma outrage once in a while. But it suggests there is indeed "omnipotence" aplenty in certain quarters; and that the public is now considered in great degree, just another adversary in the matter of order.
You might be interested in checking this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrated_Cases_of_Judge_Dee
From the preface:
> This novel clearly shows the comprehensive duties of the magistrate in his quality as presiding judge of the district tribunal. Crimes are reported directly to him, it is he who is expected to collect and sift all evidence, find the criminal, arrest him, make him confess, sentence him, and finally administer to him the punishment for his crime.
...
> It must be added, however, that it is not by the use of torture or other violent means, the judge achieves his successes but rather by his wide knowledge of his fellow men, his logical thinking, and, above all, by his deep psychological insight. It is mainly due to these assets that he succeeds in solving many a case that would have been a hard nut to crack for our modern detectives.
Will check it out, add to long list of books!
If anything, in my experience, lawyers are more aware of the limits of what law can do than are most humans.
You are missing the point.
Placing a human being in a cage because he does not believe in your laws is pretty strong. It matters very little whether O'Brien is able to converse rationally about the party while he has his hand on the electrocution dial.
Priests could afford to be open-minded with doubters so long as they have the power to place the doubter in gaol.
We don't put people in jail for not "believing in" laws, we put them in jail for not OBEYING laws. This seems like a pretty important distinction to me.
We even go to some length to specify that it's entirely legal to say that a law is bad or to try to change it.
Yet economists believe in the mythical "free market." Without reservation.
Money is a social construct- like gender, laws, or even language. That doesn't mean it isn't *real*. That just means that it doesn't exist outside of a society that uses that construct.
Content Warning: torture, ritual abuse, child abuse
Another explanation for at least some of those cases of demon parts is ritual abuse and mind control cults like the one I was raised in. As a child, I was taught a variety of religious explanations for dissociative phenomena caused by drugs, torture, gaslighting, electricity, hypnosis, and rituals, including possession by "devils" and "satan" who would take over during some of the worst parts and cooperate with the abusers. Some of these included being taught that spirits were being placed inside of me that were passed down through the family line, that my father had inherited passed down into him through his parents.
I was also trained, with similar methods, to forget, to maintain dissociative memory barriers, to avoid any awareness, memory, or acknowledgement of those events outside of very specific situations. I lived through most of my adult life in a dissociative fugue, with no memory of my childhood at all.
I'm pretty concerned by a book that endorses treating these parts as real supernatural entities without discussing ritual abuse backgrounds like mine which are pretty likely to present symptoms like those discussed in this book, with dissociated parts of deeply traumatized people claiming to be demons and devils.
It sounds like Falconer was also raised in some kind of abuse cult, although maybe it was more of an informal network of sadists who liked abusing children. You can accuse him of a lot of things, but I expect he's very sensitive to this particular situation.
no trouble if it's distressing for you to talk about, but how did you get past the fugue and recover some childhood memories?
The biggest enabling prompt for me was, my youngest sister managed to tell her therapist about the sexual abuse, and he took "mandatory reporter" status seriously, and my father got arrested. Then my sister moved in with me for six months, to get out of Utah.
Another big aspect to it was like, the fugue state I keep getting stuck in is reading fiction, ignoring reality and vicariously experiencing the lives and thoughts of fictional people while I'm reading about them. I'm not sure how much it's a cause vs being an effect of the mental processes that lead to me noticing how dissociated I was and noticing other parts of myself, but around that same time I was reading a lot of fiction about cognitohazards and mind control and complicated time travel and complicated cosmology and metaphors for AI alignment and decision theory stuff and reasoning about fictional or simulated versions of yourself. Notable mentions include There Is No Antimimetics Division and Project Lawful.
I read some good books about dissociation (Unshame) and healing from ritual abuse (Becoming Yourself). I learned about equanimity and meditation from the book The Mind Illuminated, which helped a lot for stabilizing myself through flashbacks and intense dissociative experiences while remembering.
I started writing down my flashbacks. I started taking some time every night to sit by the side of the road and listen to cars and write down whatever memories come to mind. Finding places and situations and other ways to trigger associations with childhood scenarios, accessing reminders of the self-reporting programs. Talking to my recorder whenever the flashbacks start, or whenever I realize that I don't remember what I was just talking about, to catch it when dissociated parts are switching into awareness and give them an opportunity to communicate.
A lot of talking with my partner and with a few close friends. Having someone you trust to talk to about weird and complicated stuff helps a lot. We kept getting our memory reset, forgetting what we were talking about, when we were trying to remember and disclose about this stuff at first. Having someone there just to give me reminders of what I was talking about and simple prompts to help keep me talking and on-track helped a lot.
It's been really complicated. When I'm in states where I have access to the memories, I also usually experience inability to communicate, overwhelming fear that I'll be dragged back into various drugs-and-torture scenarios if I say or do anything based on those memories, if I communicate anything about their content, and I just freeze up until I go away again. Every once in a while we end up with enough of the right parts online at the same time to try to write about it. It's like slowly dragging information through a quarantine, just a little bit at a time.
Therapy has been a big part of our recovery too.
Thank you for sharing your story. It seems more consideration (and props) needs to be given to the role of disassociation in helping those with trauma go on about their business and build their lives. Without it, you, nor I (for different reasons) would have been able to cope.
When I was a young teen - don't know the exact age - I had a sudden onset of terrible nightmares, every single night, usually of the "wakes up, but actually it's another nightmare!" variety. This kept on for weeks with no end in sight. I've had nightmares reasonably often before, but nothing remotely like this.
At that time, I figured, well, my brain is made up of some parts that do different things. For simplicity, I imagined them as little anthropomorphised neurons, though (I think) I was aware at the time that this was a great simplification.
Necessarily (in my logic back then, at least), that would mean that there are some neurons which are causing these nightmares. Since they were absolutely awful, I imagined all my neurons making a contract with each other: We all hate these nightmares, so none from now on. If I have one, I imagined the collective going on a witch hunt, one that is always going to succeed, since being part of the same brain means there is no hiding. For a while, I continued having nightmares, but when I then went to bed the next day, I imagined how the collective has found a traitor - or multiple -, and that they are now being executed. Over time, I lost my fear of nightmares - after all in my mind, they were caused by weak, foolish beings who will soon stop existing. In the same vein, they became more rare. I continued this mental image until they had stopped altogether.
Since then, I can't remember ever having a nightmare again. It just doesn't happen.
I think this concept of exorcising/banishing/executing evil elements, be it from a group or a single person, is just an extremely powerful, innate mental practice for humans to forcefully get rid of something that is truly hated. I still need to mull over the implications of this, and from realisations about other mental practices that seem simultaneously obviously untrue, but also obviously adaptive.
Is remembering nightmares particularly common for people? Me, personally, I don't *ever* remember dreams (good or bad) unless I wake up while dreaming them. This is why I've told my wife, in no uncertain terms, not to try to wake me up from a nightmare no matter how bad of a dream I appear to her to be having: because THEN I'LL REMEMBER IT!
Is it very different for other people?
Maybe not particularly common, but there are certainly a non trivial number of people who have frequent and remembered nightmares (myself, for one) for no good reason - I have lived nearly the least traumatic life possible.
Very occasionally I'd have a dream (not necessarily a nightmare) that stays in memory for a long time. I've never figured out why (not that I tried hard).
Most dreams fade within literally minutes of waking up.
I rarely remember specific details for longer than a few minutes, but I will wake up in a panic, which is unpleasant in and of itself.
Interestingly, while I'm incapable of lucid dreaming as a general rule, I have developed the ability to fairly consistently tell when a dream is turning into a nightmare and wake myself up before that happens.
Yes, of course it's different for other people. The biggest thing I have learned from reading ACX and SSC is that people are way more different than you thought possible.
If I'm having a nightmare, getting woken from it ASAP is the best thing that could happen. I'll soon forget it. OTOH I've had memorable dreams that I remember for decades.
As a child and young adult I remembered them quite well and often thought about them. Some time in college it stopped for some reason.
I seem to only remember dreams if I wake during them, but "waking during a dream" happens moderately often to me even with no external stimuli. I don't keep track, but maybe a couple times a week?
(I am fortunate to have very flexible work hours, and so I don't use an alarm to wake myself except on special occasions; I just sleep until I awake naturally. I have a hypothesis that I go through some sort of half-awake state that allows the dream to transfer to long-term memory.)
I recommend "Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad, about a man who uses vivid imagery to fight his cancer. I think the ending was just tacked on, but the rest of it is good.
Interesting. Reminds me of your story about the patient and the hairdryer. How much does it matter if the principles behind something are true/good if it helps a patient? Maybe you get a psychiatric equivalent of technical debt with these kind of solutions where you create, or leave unsolved, bigger underlying issues
What I would say is that it doesn't matter too much for treatment, but it matters what the clinician believes because that limits their ability to respond to different patients with different needs, discover new methods or improve existing ones, and generally move the state of the field forwards.
It's great if the field says 'different patients respond to different metaphors, you should use whichever metaphor helps the individual patient best, here's a 15-question diagnostic tool to help figure that out in the first session.'
It's less good if a quarter of the field believes demons are real, and a quarter of the field believes the brain is a computer that only responds to CBT-style operating instructions, and a quarter of the field etc etc., and these incompatible beliefs make each quarter of the field unable to appreciate anything from the other quarters or to notice and learn anything new about their field, and the whole field stagnates in factional battles.
We're not at either of those extremes right now, but it's good to be careful about pushing us towards the first one instead of the second.
If there are four internally-consistent, and efficacious, but mutually incompatible root theories of mental health, perhaps it would be better to formalize the divisions between those, turn them into something more like separate fields (or churches?) with separate certifications, so any given patient can more easily avoid the ones they know don't work for them. Then some overarching regulatory authority can monitor results, and keep an eye out for egregious abuses, but remain strictly neutral on the big theoretical questions.
Given that factional battles are happening, and not likely to stop, how could they be made useful? If all the factions can agree on some initial triage questionnaire (failing anything else, each could simply write their own, and then all of those get concatenated), incoming patients can be split up into types, then each faction's success rates with any given thus-definable type of patient can be tracked, across various timescales and definitions of "success."
Resulting statistics could be turned into a basis for friendly rivalry, almost like sports, with tenured researcher positions as the stakes. After all, consistently getting the best results within a specific demographic means the faction in question must be doing *something* right. Thus, might as well let some qualified expert throw a decade or three of undivided attention at trying to figure out exactly what that something is, maybe how to improve it further... or at least getting all the documentation sorted out, standardized, and archived to make sure they don't collectively forget how to maintain the fundamentals. Cross-paradigm research then flows naturally from seeking advantage in those competitions.
This is such a great review/summary/discussion!
I'm wondering if people vary by something (and I don't think that "something" is IQ, or at least not IQ alone -- maybe it's some kind of combination of IQ, Openness to Experience factor from Big5 and educational/intellectual background?) that determines their ability to use certain frameworks as metaphors, tools, "games" of sorts without reifying them. These would include IFS, classical psychoanalysis, magic, Tarot readings, chakra "work" and the whole energy meridians kaboodle etc. Or whether we'll ALL eventually slide into actually believing those things are actually real in a "really-real" sense.
I wonder if reification/essentialist takes on, for example, DSM categories are an example of the same thing from the other end.
Anecdata time: I'm a moderately traumatised (in mid life though, not childhood) woman /female with high scores on typically masc traits -- every single trait etc unidimensional inventory consistently identifies me as a dude, and two dimensional ones give me high M and moderately high F scores; most definitely NOT a borderline (if anything, slightly psychopathic before trauma), and extremely high O scores.
I find the "parts" framework very useful, especially in actually actively working with the post traumatic issues. I never had actual IFS therapist but one I did work with (mostly Dan Siegel's IPNB which I found useful as a framework if not fully convincing from the neuro side) seemed happy to adopt my natural anthropomorphisation of "limbic" or "PFC" processes (I kinda hid from her that I considered "limbic" and "PFC" as metaphors in this context too ;). Later on I encountered (online, and all were American) people involved with actual IFS and there seem to be a HUGE tendency to reify those models, and at least some overlap with people (yes, all were childhood-traumatised women, possibly borderline leaning) considered themselves, ummm, actual "systems" and referred to themselves using plural "we". Whether that's a iatrogenic pathology, beneficial strategy of semi-integration or would have been there anyway, idk. But made me think about those lines between "framework/metaphor" and "actually demons" and the risks involved.
I'm guessing the "something" is best described as hypnotizability or suggestability, but I'm not sure, and I don't know if Tarot readings fall into the same category as everything else here (partly since I'm not sure what you would use to define a Tarot reading as "successful" or not)
I meant Tarot as something you can use in "disbelief suspension": I can do a Tarot spread of let's say "my current life situation". Obviously the spread is random and unrelated causally to my life situation. Another person holding the same deck asking a different question would get exactly the same spread. But I can STILL use it as canvas on which to project what's in my head (which is eminently relevant). But I can't imagine myself starting to believe that I'm getting external insights. Could replace with Rorschach or Koch tree or pretty much any projective "test" (though the supposed mechanism is different for Tarot and projective "tests"). Success is defined as "obtained insights that were not necessarily available otherwise".
And while I don't need to believe that doing a Tarot spread allows me access to external sources of knowledge, or even, to be Jungian about it, with shared human archetypes floating in some kind of ether of universal sub/semi consciousness, *suspending* this disbelief, going into the experience as a make-believe "play" (so, method acting, or sport or BDSM scene like) makes it certainly more fun and possibly more effective.
But it also creates a potential problem of NOT permanently acquiring those make-belief beliefs: to use the analogy from psychedelia, ideally you'd go into the experience fully open to let's say experiencing dragons (or even becoming one, as long as you can be sure someone will stop you from trying to fly) BUT ALSO absolutely sure that they don't actually exist and even if they did, people couldn't transform into dragons. So, we want a powerful cognitive anchors in reality, but we also want openness to the trip, or, pivoting back to the therapeutic approaches, the utility of such frameworks.
Apologies, I don't have this worked out so I'm thinking aloud here.
Ultimately, I agree that reification/essentialist takes on ICD entities are probably less potentially damaging than iatrogenic demons, especially in a culture where the former is an accepted mainstream belief and the latter reads as a pointer to psychosis workup.
Buzan recommended a similar idea, opening a dictionary to a random page and tapping a random word and relating it to whatever the topic at hand was, back when there were books.
Yes, similar. Very many years ago, and even more miles/social systems away I had a clinical psych tutor who combined kinda hippy sensibility with a very realistic view of for example acute psychosis, and who was obliged by the curriculum to teach us about things like Rorschach etc and I remember her saying "y'know, this is all good but also kinda dubious, ultimately you need experience and judgment, and when you have that you don't need ink blots, you can diagnose using a chair or a picture of a puppy".
I use Tarot cards in the way you describe, and find it very helpful.
It's kind of like asking someone with relationship troubles "how is your significant other like the moon? if one of those ways was the cause here, what might it be?" and getting them to free-associate. I agree with you that a kind of doublethink is necessary to get value out of it – you have to give your brain permission to explore the idea uncritically, otherwise self-censorship gets in the way.
My wife has a highly developed sense of the ridiculous and gets nothing at all out of any kind of spiritualism or woo (she can't even enjoy yoga), whereas I'm as atheist as they come but still find the 'vibes' of some spiritual practices helpful/comforting.
Scott makes a good point that the objective level fact of the matter isn't really relevant to one's inner life; I think that's exactly right.
iff this frustrates her, consider getting her the Science Tarot. my own woo allergy prevents me from suspending my screaming disbelief for long enough to get anything whatsoever out of the standard Rider-Waite tarot deck, and most other decks are even worse, but the Science deck is so cleverly built (which distracts the critical mind with shiny things) and on such comfortably non-allergenic themes that I can kinda get into it.
Honestly, I wonder if it's more analogous to something like taste in music... lots of factors influence it and it's not totally predictable, but some people just respond better to some styles of art than others.
Could just be that the important thing is that the patient is engaged and invested and really doing the work consistently without shirking (and doing it in a proper way that aims them towards improvement), and it doesn't matter too much which metaphor or ritual they're using as long as they are doing the work.
> maybe it's some kind of combination of IQ, Openness to Experience factor from Big5 and educational/intellectual background?
The first thing that came to mind when I read that was that famous quote, "The mark of an educated mind is to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
(Though I suppose that, in practice, for a very long time & perhaps today, the mark of an educated mind is doing the exact opposite of that and believing in what other people believe very very hard, so you can be their minister & priest. Or commissar & political officer. Or shaman & spirit guide. Such was the case in Mediaeval Europe, Stalinist Russia, and other times & places at least. Maybe even our own, if you want to be pessimistic. At the very least, it'd be foolish for Stalin to set up universities and *not* make sure that no one does the "entertain a thought without accepting & ferverently believing it" thing regarding Stalinism, or for the Church to run its universities without making sure that they first don't undermine the Church, or for the Imperial Chinese education system to not produce 'excellent sheep' that can serve as a role model to the other sheep.
I wouldn't be surprised, at least, if that sort of "find things Beautiful without finding them True" thing is actually something that's more a matter of temperament than anything else... same way Diogenes was the one who showed Plato his plucked chicken "Man" despite Plato being the one running the Academy.)
The back half of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" is about the theory that rational thought is downstream from persuasiveness. That we evolved to use language and rationalization to persuade other humans to share a common belief structure, which let us coordinate together. Meme spreading, basically. And the ability to actually think rationally about the world is a side-effect, which can be helpful but which can also make the person hard to coordinate with if the rest of the society is operating on vibes and memes.
I think this is actually a very interesting question. As for which psychometric dimension that most highly correlated with "reification of mental frameworks", I would think that it is negatively associated with IQ, and positively associated with schizophrenic indicators (or Sapolsky's framing, "magic surrealist thinking").
What I understand to be the thing that IQ measures is not intelligence per se, but rather abstraction skills, rotating a 3D shape inside your head, solving math equations, and generally interpreting and framing experiences through the lense of mental abstractions. With adeptness as manipulating abstractions, it follows that swapping out abstractions (models of the world) for other abstractions is a very practised skill. And since abstractions get swapped in and out, the less attachment to each one as the epistemological frame for interpreting the world. Which I think correlates in my experience with high rates of aethiesm in high IQ people; not because religion is rationally deduced as implausible, but because religion requires commitment to a singular mental model that gets no updates (unlike science) to the abstraction.
The negatively correlated trend, I think, would be the schizophrenic trait type, which I have some personal experience of under the influence of certain mind altering substances. In this typology, the mental and physical boundaries are a continuous gradient where one flows into the other, and any mental abstractions seem to be defacto contingent on some physical phenomena.
"religion requires commitment to a singular mental model that gets no updates (unlike science)"
If you study the history of Western thought and theology, I think you will find that religious models are often updated! For example, Christianity was originally pitched as a update to Judaism. And there are ongoing reforms, arguments, and compromises being made in every mainstream religious community.
I've sometimes wondered why, out of all the claims made by religions and other supernatural systems, the existence of demons and evil spirits seems to be among the most denigrated and the most likely one for more "rationalist" believers to castigage and be uncomfortable about, since it would seem to also be one of the most universal beliefs, one with a certain level of evidence (like described here!), and anecdotally one of the likelier ones to cause skeptics to insta-convert to believers of some sort.
Maybe because it's one of the most testable? "God exists and has a plan" is pretty distant from any particular situation, but "this medical problem is caused by a demon" pays rent in anticipated experience, to use the LW term.
Falconer had an interesting section about elite vs. folk religion, where the folk religion was constantly believing in demons and the elites were constantly trying to shut them down. Uncharitably, maybe this is because the elites' priests were worse at casting out demons than random medicine women or whatever, so this was a threat to their power.
I feel that we have to mention Maxwell's Demon at this point, although I struggle to think what exactly its message is...
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon
The same people who tell us that demons don't exist, also tell us that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is true? :-)
Touché!
I mean, it also could be the case that the elite were in league with the demons.
Is *that* why conspiracy theorists so often accuse the modern day elite of being in league with the demons / being satanic pedophile child abusers guilty of every single crime the conspiracy theorists can think of?
A lot of people on /r/conspiracy talk about demonic possession in a kinda vibes-based way ("I look at people on the street and I just *know* something's wrong with them" and so on), which makes me wonder if there's a shared mechanic of "making yourself super-vigilant for signals from your subconscious."
When I see a drug addict in that weird leg-bent slump, it does seem that some bizarre force is holding them up, because a normal person would have either stood up straight or collapsed.
There's also a distinct set of signals given off by people who are unstable and looking for a fight.
So in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, we can confidently guess a substantial percentage of our elites are involved in underage prostitution rings and human trafficking. Hope this isn't a non sequitur.
St Paul wrote (Ephesians ch 6)
"Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
I guess that could be read as either a portentous warning about supernatural demons in league with Satan, or a rather more practical message that the evil to be challenged resides more in general attitudes, especially as encouraged by the leadership, rather than individuals.
Science cannot disprove the existence of demons, any more than it can prove the existence of God. All science can do is provide a framework for testing hypotheses.
Though it's very clear in the book review that the author believes demons to be real and not metaphorical, scientifically the difference is irrelevant. He says an electron is a particle, she says it's a wave, and I say it's a splorf.
"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
This is an undeniably correct quote, but I don't understand the relevance. I'm not saying whether the demons hypothesis is correct. I'm saying it isn't testable scientifically.
"A difference that makes no difference is no difference."
If it's untestable then it's untrue; Occam's Broadsword.
Everyone's *almost* an atheist, right? There are roughly 4000 religions; people believe in almost invariably 0 or 1, likely never more than... ten?
Perhaps some syncretic polytheistic religions get to higher numbers ... though actively worshiping more than Dunbar's number of deities would presumably be a strain on memory... :-)
Gödel proved some things are true that cannot be proven true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
Charitably, the parent comment could be expressing positivism. In positivism, an assertion that is untestable (i.e. cannot affect the world) is treated as meaningless and ignored, roughly as if it were untrue.
I do not read "meaningless and ignored" at all the same as "untrue". If one cannot tell whether a demon or some mysterious brain process is causing a psychosis, the distinction should be meaningless and ignored, but it could still be true that a demon is possessing someone, just not relevant.
Then you're not a positivist.
It may not be the most intuitive philosophy, but it isn't *that* weird. If I say there's an invisible dragon in Iceland that can't be touched, heard, smelled, or affect the world in anyway whatsoever, you could say that my theory is untestable but possible. But most people would probably just say there is no invisible dragon.
That's Russell's teapot. I could explain static electricity generated by rubbing things on hair by explaining such rubbing irritates the ethereal blue dragons, who then spout lightning. They're ethereal, so you can't detect them. The difference is an explanation of an observed phenomenon: static electricity generation, which is so far unexplained scientifically. Your invisible dragon is the same as the teapot: it explains nothing at all, and there is no reason to postulate either.
Oxford Languages says positivism is "a philosophical system that holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof". You're absolutely right that I'm not one. It's a logically flawed philosophy, as no assumptions can be proven or scientifically verified. If they can be, they aren't assumptions! Yet logic and science all do indeed have assumptions, any of which may theoretically be tested or proven (but not all, as Gödel proved).
Whether you want to assume demons exist or that they don't, until we have some test to tell which is correct, it isn't a scientific question.
> It's a logically flawed philosophy, as no assumptions can be proven or scientifically verified.
This doesn't really have any relation. Positivists are fine with axioms or statements like "assuming X then Y".
> Whether you want to assume demons exist or that they don't, until we have some test to tell which is correct, it isn't a scientific question.
Now you're sounding like a positivist.
Another example would be the various interpretations of quantum mechanics (e.g. many worlds interpretation) that yield identical results. A positivist would probably say the interpretations aren't meaningful.
>That's Russell's teapot.
I sort-of wonder if, since Musk had a Tesla Roadster launched into space (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster), whether the possibility that someone snuck a teapot inside it have significantly raised the odds of Russell's teapot... :-)
Fist bump.
Not sure you really want to rid yourself of the external world, other minds, the "existence" of unobservables, etc
Not at all; datastarve would kill me quickly, I think. The external world and other minds are testable, though; remember high school geometry?
Specific claims about demons can be tested - i.e., if someone says that demonic possession makes you start levitating and speaking Latin, then you can observe that that doesn't actually happen.
(Yes, yes, the demons could be hiding, induction is impossible. But you can demonstrate that it doesn't happen any time you could observe it, and that's good enough for most purposes.)
The book apparently made no such claims about the demon's powers. If it did, as you say, such claims would be testable.
We know Newton's theory of gravity is wrong, but we often still use it because it is right enough in some circumstances for our purposes. It's a useful paradigm in those situations. In the same way, if it is useful to think of a psychosis as caused by demonic possession, such that performing an exorcism ritual on the patient cures them, it makes no difference at all whether you can detect the demon in other ways. If the result is the same whether it's a demon or the placebo effect, what difference does it make?
On the other hand, if there IS a difference one can point to, maybe we can find a way to determine which it is, and get closer to the truth.
If there were some transmission mechanism proposed for "catching" demons, then wouldn't partitioning the population into those with greater or lesser odds of "catching" a demon be expected to correlate with demonic symptoms? It isn't a double-blinded RCT, but it would be _something_. This would be sort-of analogous to the classic experiment showing that mosquitoes transmit malaria ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2825508/ ).
>In the meantime several Italian workers were already on the trail. Bignami had suggested in 1896 that mosquitoes might transmit malaria by inoculation but it wasn't until 1898 that he and Grassi, who were fortunate to have access to sites where malaria was present near Rome and in Sicily, produced the final proof when they fed local Anopheles claviger mosquitoes on infected patients and subsequently transmitted the infection to uninfected individuals via the bite of these mosquitoes [38].
The reason is Occam's Razor.
MPD exists? A single brain can have multiple network structures that produce something like 'personalities' that each have their own names and voices and can 'take over' at different times? That's kind of weird and surprising, but ultimately it's just something weird about human brains, which are something we don't understand well anyway and certainly have enough computational complexity to host a process like that.
Demons exist? That means Heaven and Hell exist? Supernatural phenomena that no scientists has ever been able to observe but which can influence minds and the physical world exist? Sentient agents with no brain or other physical instantiation exist? For that to be true, we need to overturn *everything we know* about science, metaphysics, and the nature of reality.
Occam's Razor places a really really heavy tax on demons, that extends far beyond the realm of psychology itself. Less so on a lot of other explanations.
> For that to be true, we need to overturn *everything we know* about science, metaphysics, and the nature of reality.
Not at all. The only thing that needs to be thrown out is the notion of axiomatic materialism.
> Supernatural phenomena that no scientists has ever been able to observe but which can influence minds and the physical world exist?
Plenty of scientists have observed — and even attempted to measure, analyze, and quantify, with varying degrees of success — spiritual phenomena. They tend to get called cranks and psuedoscientists and whatnot, because axiomatic materialism a priori precludes such claims being taken seriously.
It's the ultimate in question-begging circular logic:
1) Nothing outside the realm of the physical exists in reality, therefore your claim is false.
2) All claims of supernatural phenomena have been found to be false, therefore materialism is true.
I've seen self-proclaimed rationalists use this *exact* formula, completely un-self-consciously, more times than I'd care to remember, never seeming to notice that all they've done is use their axiom to demonstrate the validity of the axiom according to itself. When people accidentally use claims derived from Euclid's Parallel Postulate to "prove" that the Parallel Postulate can be proven from first principles, people notice the circular logic. But somehow this specific piece of circular logic always seems to slip through the cracks.
> Occam's Razor places a really really heavy tax on demons, that extends far beyond the realm of psychology itself. Less so on a lot of other explanations.
Remember, Occam was a priest. He would be aghast at this misuse of his principle.
When I talk about observing supernatural phenomena, I'm not talking about their behavioral consequents, I'm talking about their method of action.
There is definitely an observed behavior where people act like they've been possessed by demons. You can describe that real observable phenomenon in a lot of detail, and scientific study of it is valid.
But for a demon to possess a person, there has to be *a direct causal mechanism*. Sight is mediated by photons, heat is a measure of molecular motion, tires work by friction and torque, etc.
There's no direct mechanism that we've ever been able to observe and measure that could cause demonic possession. Nor anything within the physical laws that explain everything we've been able to observe that suggests a mechanism which could exist.
For such a mechanism to exist, you have to radically degrade our model of the universe. Which would predict all kinds of other phenomenon that we don't observe, in addition to being far more complex.
You're still trapped inside the confines of axiomatic materialism.
If, rather than assuming that a bunch of chemical processes within the brain is all there is to "the self," you accept that "there is a spirit in man," a non-material existence that uses the brain as its interface to drive the body, then it's not at all implausible to accept the idea of other spirits trying to hijack the body.
The scientific method is the same whether the world is materialist or dualist or idealist.
Events have causes, things that exist are observable. Whether the thing we observe is 'ultimately' material or ideal makes no difference.
If you want to posit a world where causality doesn't exist or where we can't observe real phenomena that cause observable outcomes, then you have to explain why the rest of the world looks like those things exist and those assumptions keep correctly explaining and predicting everything else we can reliably observe, and you have to come up with a model of metaphysic that explains why the world looks so predictable and regular despite those things not existing.
None of this has anything to do with materialism vs dualism vs idealism. The notion that your observations need to be explained by a model of an external universe that would produce them, and that more complex models are less likely than more complex models if they both explain the observations equally well, is more fundamental than the question of what the universe is made of.
Ah, now I see where you're coming from.
This one's actually pretty simple if you understand basic economics and why it so consistently proves lacking in any large degree of predictive power. Economists are often spoken of as having "physics envy" because they look at the data, make their models, predict what the economy is going to do in the next year, and then it does something completely different. Not the prediction, not 180-degrees-off "the prediction was exactly wrong" either, but typically anywhere from 30-120 degrees off from the prediction, so to speak.
Physics is, broadly speaking, the science of analyzing inanimate objects. If you tell me how heavy the cannonball is, how much powder you're using, the angle of the gun, and the vector of the wind, I can place a target on the ground right under the spot that the ball will land, and the ball will hit it 10 times out of 10. But try to predict the behavior of *people,* and that predictive power just falls apart, because people make choices rather than simply following predetermined paths in response to external stimuli.
> you have to come up with a model of metaphysic that explains why the world looks so predictable and regular despite those things not existing.
The simple explanation is: it *doesn't* look predictable and regular at all, at least not at the points where you have conscious, decision-making entities involved. The metaphysical term is "free will," and the whole problem here is that it consistently proves stubbornly resistant to reliable modeling.
From Dune: "Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"
Computer programs have interfaces, but if I run a program with a debugger attached, I can look inside at its memory, and alter whatever I like. Hackers can do similar things on programs that don't have debuggers attached. Games do it for speed runs and stuff like that. It might seem like wizardry to someone who's only been an end-user on systems that someone else maintains, but that's because their limited experience hasn't prepared them to understand the underlying structure.
(Do we have any hard evidence of this happening in reality? AFAIK, no. It's mostly limited to perturbations in human neural nets, which we don't understand anyway, so I agree with Occam's Razor here.)
> you have to radically degrade our model of the universe
I wouldn't say "degrade". We've had several revolutions in the past, where a new model superseded an old model because it explained phenomena that the old model didn't, and sometimes that was because we had developed newer and more sensitive instruments to detect those phenomena.
That said, I think we're headed in a different direction. We're starting to develop techniques that can be used to analyze AI neural nets. We'll get better and better at those, and eventually start trying to apply the same things to human neural nets. And Iong term, I think we'll develop more understanding of how these self-perpetuating patterns develop, and why people keep being able to regress Bing chat back into Sydney.
>For that to be true, we need to overturn *everything we know* about science, metaphysics, and the nature of reality.
Well, why not? We've already done that at least once to get to the world where the standard explanation for the phenomenon described by Scott is "sure, they're demons".
We overturn everything we know when the evidence is strong enough to make that the most likely explanation.
But this ain't that kind of evidence.
Very interesting! Was surprised to find no result ctr+f-ing Tulpas, which seem relevant as an example of previously-unitary people crafting a personified "voice in their head" on purpose, in many cases without adverse effects and without buying into a supernatural explanation. Seems to be IFS for fun?
I agree that would have been a good example to talk about here. I do discuss it a bit more in Part III of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-resident-contrarian-on-unfalsifiable
Ah, thanks!
As a parent, I sometimes wonder what the best theory of mind to teach a child is? This review highlights a big negative of multiple part theory of mind, and it might be best in general to have a similar theory of mind as your western’s peers that is individualized. But I also see extremely high teen mental illness rates and think that some theory of mind must be better?
I also wonder what historical cultural had the best mental health? Might need to go before WWI just because of the increase in PTSD in modern warfare.
I'm leaning towards "don't". Like yes, they'll absorb the western theory of mind in bits and pieces, but I think this is less bad than deliberately encouraging them to pay attention to their internal landscape.
I'd love to hear you expand on this last part.
There was a piece in the NYT on how teaching American schoolchildren some basics of paying attention to your mental state actually resulted in their becoming worse off/more anxious. Too much self-awareness is a dangerous thing?
Could also be a matter of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing", where the unit is a sort of in-passing intro without follow-up or guidance
There's a whole book on this called "Bad Therapy", with an entry in the currently open ACX book review contest and a pretty damning review over at thingofthings. That said, there may be a grain of truth in the whole matter.
Also, in the words of an old British comedy show "Of course too much is bad for you! That's what 'too much' means, you ****!"
Because they may notice things like "there is no free will" too soon? Or can you pls elaborate?
Why teach children "What to think" ? They'll be taught plenty of that. What children will generally never have enough of is a cultivation of curiosity, honesty and courage-- the world generally takes those away tacitly or explicitly.
I personally think PTSD has less to do with "theory of mind", and more to do with lying. The more people have a clear understanding of the world around them, the less they'll get PTSD, and the more they're living in a web of "noble" lies, the more they'll get PTSD when they finally find out what's going on. Especially when they find out in a traumatic situation, and then the rest of the society prefers to maintain the noble lie. My guess is that it's probably got something to do with mass media, coordinated propaganda, and non-humanocentric ideology, so I'm not sure that pre-20th-century methods would still work in this new environment.
On an only marginally-related note, having gone back to your review of Jaynes, I came across this bit:
> As you go about your day, you hear a voice that tells you what to do, praises you for your successes, criticizes you for your failures, and tells you what decisions to make in difficult situations.
Closely followed by:
> Jaynes has done some research on the imaginary friend phenomenon, and argues that a better term would be “hallucinatory friend” – children see and hear these entities vividly.
As someone who has been "blessed" with a combination of aphantasia and lack of internal monologue (at least of the sort described above), I'm sitting here, shaking my head, asking WT Actual F?
I did a survey on this, and found somewhere less than 1% of people agreeing to this statement.
Which one? The one about hearing an internal commentary?
Sorry, no, the one about hallucinating your imaginary friend.
Gotcha.
Since I've been polling people close to me regarding their ability to visualise recently, I've noted that some of them claim to be able to picture things very vividly. I wonder if it may be that the line between "very vivid imagining" and "hallucination" may be hard to draw, when we're talking about other people's experiences.
What are your dreams like? Are they ever set in locations you don't recall visiting?
My dreams are rather vivid and colourful* (an interesting contrast to my waking lack of visual imagination), and yes, I would say that most of them are set in locations that I have never visited, because they don't exist - to the point that I can tell that even places that are supposed to represent locations from my life are very different, like my house containing a completely different set of rooms.
---
* I'm told that this isn't a given, which was another one of those "Huh, it'd be a funny ol' world if we were all alike." moments for me.
Is the dream version of your house consistent with itself? That is, the same layout as in previous dreams?
No. As far as I can remember, there has never been an occasion where any of the place that I had lived in at some point, that came up in my dreams, resembled their real-life counterparts in any but the crudest details.
In fact, I find it quite amazing how the dreaming mind is able to convince itself that everything is perfectly normal, despite all evidence to the contrary.
I wasn't asking it it resembled the real world house, but the dream house in -other- dreams. Or is it a freshly generated house each time?
My bad. I understood what you meant to ask, but didn't do a good job of answering.
The answer is "no". The layout is always different.
There is also the issue that most people have poor memory of their early childhood when this tends to happen.
Yeah, I expect this discrepancy is best explained by "fuzzy categories".
One answer: the distinction is easy, because you are controlling your visualisations, and know that you are controlling them.
Problem: hypnagogic hallucinations. Probably, not everyone sees this. But if you have this experience, the rapidly shifting and changing stuff you see when the lights are out (its dark, cutting out the light from real things) and you are trying to sleep. Both appear to be essential elements. But,, in any case, these may not be entirely under your control/ Still: source tracking. You are aware that are not real.
Some psychiatry textbooks get into a tangle arguing whether hypnagogic hallucinations are the same thing as psychotic hallucinations, or something entirely different.
A possible theory, that some of those authors neglect. If you think that drug induced hallucinations and psychotic hallucinations are in fact the same thing, because you think the drug is targeting the same brain function as schizophrenia, then you should at least consider the possibility that the onset of sleep shuts down the same brain functions that are also implicated in hallucinogenic drugs, etc.
Which is why I specifically restricted my point to other people's experiences.
You might be able to tell whether your visualizations are real or not - by means of control, if nothing else - though I note that - being otherwise aphantasic - I occasionally experience brief visualizations as I am falling asleep. I am unable to control them in the slightest, but I am also perfectly aware of the fact that they aren't real (to clarify: I am aware of it as it is happening). However, that tells you nothing of the nature of other people's visualizations. Even if you have a body of experience regarding what it feels like to visualize and hallucinate (personally, I have neither), how - if at all - that matches up with what other people report is mostly guesswork.
a fun one: discussions of aphantasia often talk about visualising the story in a book you're reading.
Personally, I cannot read and visualize simultaneously. The visualizations would get in the way of the printed words on the page that I am trying to read. I can rapidly alternate between them, however People's personal experiences seem to vary quite widely.
But, if someone with aphantasia wonders how on Earth non-aphantasics can distinguish visualisations from hallucinations... they appear in a distinct space, are controllable, or at the very least have what the psychiatrists call "source tracking" ... for most people...
I'm pointing out that a second party would have the devil's time establishing whether a child is actually hallucinating or just has a vivid imagination.
I want a look at how the sense of something being real works. It obviously comes and goes and isn't completely reliable, but it's fairly good and what is it anyway?
Hmm... I think that my ability to visualize has declined somewhat over the years (I'm 65 now). "Hallucination" seems to me to have too negative a connotation for this. E.g. if one is looking at a geometric puzzle, and visualizes where to put an additional line or set of lines as part of solving the puzzle, is "hallucination" really a good term for this process?
I suspect that "hallucination" is generally a bad term for any situation where the parts of the brain responsible for making sense of what your eyes are feeding them aren't seriously misfiring (either for intrinsic, or substance-induced reasons).
However, getting what it feels like to you across to someone else may be tricky, especially if you don't have a good vocabulary or a good amount of knowledge or experience to fall back on - for instance, if you are a child.
So, while you might be able to clarify, on being interviewed that yes, you can imagine something or someone in vivid detail, but it's not like a hallucination or anything (in other words you can easily differentiate between what you see and what you imagine), a child attempting to do so might not even be aware that such a thing as hallucination exists, nor how it might manifest.
So the child describes just how vivid their "perception" of their imaginary friend is, and the incautious scientist records it as the child hallucinating their friend.
A game of telephone, in other words.
Many Thanks! That sounds plausible.
I can't remember where that particular survey was, and if it covered childhood imaginary friends. Did people report *literally* seeing and hearing entities?
As a child, I 100% believed stuffed animals were conscious entities that could move around if no human was present, and that some white horses were secret unicorns in captivity.
But I was utterly crushed that imaginary friends didn't work like in TV and movies, where the friend is audible and visible to the imaginer (and the audience, of course). I tried multiple times to order up an imaginary friend and none ever happened. It was always extremely obvious that no one else was actually there.
I always assumed everyone else had this kind of experience with imaginary friends and was faking seeing / hearing them.
See when I was a kid I pretended to be able to see imaginary friends, precisely because that same childrens TV had convinced me that this was A Thing and I was weird because I didn't have one.
I'd love to know how many other people did that as children. While I had the capacity to believe in fantasy, I was also pretty literal about the real world! When the promised fantasy didn't work in real life *exactly* like it did in media, I immediately concluded imaginary friends weren't "real" - not for me, and not for anyone else, either. I never believed or played along with anyone else's imaginary friends because they were obviously not actually real.
I have no idea why I was so confident no one else had an imaginary friend, either.
Typo alert: "Trying to exorcising"
Additionally, a couple of quote blocks have typos, but since they're quoted I don't know if they're in the book or not:
"Now I was really scared Visions of malpractice danced in my head." (missing period)
"I have folloed this woman"
"very lucky and fortune person"
Fixed.
A long time friend of mine, back when she was aspiring to be a folk singer, had a song, "Invite Them In," inspired by her understanding of Buddhism, in which she recommended dealing with demons by compassion and friendliness. I'm not sure that would work with all demons, any more than I would try it with all human beings or all other animals; some are just too dangerous. But it's one possible approach.
That same woman is a player in one of my current roleplaying campaigns, an urban fantasy based on shared dreams, where the player characters have discovered that at least some forms of "mental illness" (for example, one case of paranoid schizophrenia) result from having one's mind occupied by an intrusive psychic entity, and dealing with that entity can relieve the problems. I reserve judgment on this idea's validity in the Primary World, but it certainly supports an entertaining narrative.
IIRC, according to some of the medieval/Renaissance era catalogues of demons, some of the demons were hoping to get back into God's good graces.
>A long time friend of mine, back when she was aspiring to be a folk singer, had a song, "Invite Them In," inspired by her understanding of Buddhism, in which she recommended dealing with demons by compassion and friendliness.
Cool! Allison Lonsdale's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uLBO03YR_Y ?
I really like her "Unclean" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FSqgb9ZfDw
albeit I fit into the
>The doctors and priests who refrain from the feast
( though I'm actually a retired programmer )
Yeah, that's her. My own favorite of her songs is "Grandmother's Place," with all its little jokes about mythic figures. I'm delighted that you know of her.
Many Thanks!
I literally just opened substack as a palate cleanser after reading The Screwtape Letters and getting delusion-of-reference heebie-jeebies. Thats enough reading for today
Welcome to the psychic field :) I made a comment just yesterday in which I happened to mention one of the psychiatrist Scott Peck's books and how he believed in demons, and now our Scott has mentioned Scott Peck while reviewing another book that's more or less about the intersection of psychology and demons.
Many interesting parallels with L Ron Hubbard's work. In Dianetics he referred to the source of some mental "abberations" being the product of "demon circuits". At the time he stressed that they weren't real demons, it was simply a handy metaphor, as they seemed to behave like separate entities, with names and characters if you interrogated them.
A couple of decades later they resurfaced as the Big Secret of the OT levels - we are all populated by degraded beings inhabiting our bodies which must be audited away - at great expense of course - in order to free ourselves.
As someone who was dumb enough and unfortunate enough to find himself deep in that rabbit hole many years ago and managed to climb back out to the fresh air and sunshine, I can vouch for the self-fulfilling nature of many of these characters of the inner world.
The stated goal of Hubbard's work was to free the person's attention from their own mind and bring them to full awareness and alertness in present time. In actuality, it drives people deeper and deeper into themselves, chasing shadows of shadows in a baroque architecture that only ever grows more vivid and threatening.
I also thought of what I've read about Scientology while reading this. A few years ago I came across some amazing article about what the introductory scientology courses are like, the ones that masquerade as public speaking courses. (There are plenty of articles about them online but the one I'm thinking of was better than what seems to come up, in terms of analyzing what's going on. Wish I could find it.) It seems to operate on the same plane as a lot of this stuff.
I noticed the similarity to Scientology in the linked post about Leverage Research:
"In a debugging session, you’d be led through a series of questions or attentional instructions with goals like working through introspective blocks, processing traumatic memories, discovering the roots of internal conflict, “back-chaining” through your impulses to the deeper motivations at play, figuring out the roots of particular powerlessness-inducing beliefs, mapping out the structure of your beliefs, or explicating irrationalities."
They were doing this to each other for 8 hours a day. Sounds a lot like auditing right?
Jon Atack (youtube channel, books) says that Scientology promised freedom from the ordinary constraints of life, but just got people more and more trapped. Some people do get out, but he says it's the hardest cult to recover from.
Does he have an explanation of why? From what I've gathered, Hubbard was a hack and a dabbler, not exactly evil mastermind material. Did he just blunder into the nuclear-grade cult recipe?
I'm not sure, but I think Atack's take is that Hubbard wasn't good news to start with, and the promise of having full control of one's mind and circumstances was something that worked to hook people.
the secret sauce of scientology is that they got some really rich early converts and remained "kooky but tolerated" pre-internet. The amount of money they had to throw at lawyers (or private black ops operations) makes them hard to stop, and frankly, a lot of Americans seem to assume they must be somehow legitimate otherwise how would they have so much money?
Fascinating. Would love to read your thoughts on RRT-Rapid Resolution Therapy next.
I think there's also something very interesting in how the IFS model (of Self, firefighter/exile, and manager) mirrors the Platonic tripartite soul.
In my understanding of the model the exile(s) are fragments of the self that long for reunification with the whole (which is eternal and beyond being (Plotinus’ Hen and Polloi - forgive my lack of Greek characters)
The Firefighter has the most to do with appetite and using appetite for sensation to remedy against feeling hurt (in the model a firefighter might push the patient to drink, or self harm and is reactive in a bodily way against the threat of painful experiencing)
The Manager maps onto the Thymos, and uses achievement, honor, organization to rule the client but without illuminating wisdom, kindness and direction of Reason. The Manager is again more concerned with avoiding feeling the fragmentation than with the Truth.
The framing of the Exile as a splinter of the self helps to solve the problem of psychic injury in Platonism (why are we in the cave…?) without resorting to the Fall.
Regarding the Daemon and Legacy Burdens: My sense is they are very different phenomena. Legacy burdens are straightforwardly an analogue for intergenerational trauma. Whether intergenerational trauma actually exists (in my experience of my own family and the fallout we've experienced from fleeing Europe circa WW2 yes, but maybe that's a narrative we've constructed without base) is arguable but I think that IT is Schwartz’ referent.
The unattached burdens are much trickier to square, but maybe useful in trying understand them in the context of the model would be: IFS is already considering dissociation to be a spectrum. Where extreme dissociative identity disorder (which is mostly seen clinically in young survivors of incest, CSA, and organized abuse) is on spectrum with much milder hurt. For example the model might consider the experience of going home for a holiday and feeling like a teenager again on the same spectrum as losing time.
In the same way, the model (and this is my theorizing more than anything else) could consider the psychosis experience of unattached burdens to be on the same spectrum as full blown psychosis (which I think is best described in Annie Roger's Incandescent Alphabets).
If, in fact, we are always already in a constant dialogue of fragmentation and reunification, perhaps also there's a thread of psychosis experience that runs below the surface in everything we do as well?
Terming the firefighter and exiles the single under the seems pretty distorting, no?
Whoops- terming the firefighter and the exile as a single entity seems pretty distorting, no?
I group them together because as I understand the model, the firefighter manifests as a response to the exiling, almost as two half of the same thing
Although I am certain I could have been clearer :)
Interesting that non Christians are now joining the debate - are demons simply how we used to understand mental illness, or is mental illness merely a manifestation of demonic possession? If nothing else, it could be psychologically useful to reject the parts of yourself that wish you and the people you care about harm. I am somewhat sceptical of the claim that psychotherapeutic exorcism is a once-and-done deal though, I feel like certain issues would be harder to resolve.
As soon as I heard about internal family system I immediately thought about how I used to personify my self loathing as a malevolent entity that hated me, and I don't really think that helped me much, because it had a lot of reasonable arguments in favour of me being a terrible person. I'm pretty sure that was just an expression of my own unreasonably high standards, it took me a while to accept that I wasn't ever going to be perfect, but I could probably have been convinced it was a demon at the time.
Not gonna lie, this sounds like some Persona 4 type stuff
Guy who's never heard of psychology outside the extremely attenuated Jung in the Persona series: this is giving me major Persona vibes
Of course I heard of Jung, I'm just commenting on the childish videogame-like nature of it all
Can someone link me to a source for footnote five's comment, "genetic evidence, which shows that evolution has been selecting against schizophrenia genes for at least 40,000 years" ? This sounds very interesting.
Googling the obvious phrase will give you some hits. One that’s pretty accessible is https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-evolution-of-schizophrenia.amp
Everyone is traumatized these days. If you don't have big trauma, you can have small trauma. If you don't have PTSD, you can get C-PTSD. Oh you were not abused? But your dad did scream at you, remember? Great, you can have trauma. Welcome
Does anyone know when/why this trend started? IFS, Body keeps the score, Gabor Mate (ok, this one clear has trauma, just look at him)... all started from this trauma trend.
The backlash on proven methods also seem to come from that. Change my self-defeating distorted views of myself and the world through evidence and behavior? C'mon... that's too simple. Let me look inside and "discover" my demons.
Freud's seduction theory was the first formulation of what could be considered "trauma" (the theory that premature sexual experience causes hysteria)
Trauma as a category at least since the 80s (Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery came out in 1992 which introduces complex PTSD)
Thanks. It is certainly not new, but the idea that everyone is a at least a bit traumatized is new, isn't it? Just to make clear, I know that trauma is real and the pain it causes is tremendous. My question is if it is healthy to treat everything as trauma.
I think so,
It seems to have become trendy as a diagnosis in the late 2000s ? And certainly the idea that Trauma is anything that's upsetting (instead of Trauma being a response to overwhelming fear for one's life in an unavoidable way) I think does everyone a huge disservice
Agreed, especially as the redefined notion of trauma is largely antithetical to antifragility. If you redefine stress and discomfort — which are vital to proper mental and emotional development — as "trauma" to be avoided and shielded against, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, delivering people without the emotional fortitude to avoid being traumatized by what well-adjusted people would shrug off as minor irritations.
Treating people as if they were fragile, rather than antifragile, is one of the worst abuses you can possibly perpetrate against them.
"Trauma" used to be a bad thing (fitting within a specific class of very bad things) that caused post-traumatic symptoms. Now, thanks in part to Herman and the other cPTSD advocates, "trauma" is dissociated from post-traumatic symptoms, so that a person can claim to be "traumatized" with zero conventional PTSD symptoms.
That's not my reading of C-ptsd at all, my understanding (and it's been a few years since I read Herman) is that C-ptsd involves all the major hallmarks of regular PTSD plus additional cognitive distortions and longer term effects
In my understanding it was invented as a more severe category to differentiate the symptoms of long term incest (the population Herman worked with), CSA and torture (in a POW type situation) from regular PTSD from things like a single incident sexual assault or mugging
Yeah, isn't cPTSD supposed to be *worse*?
Maybe it's connected to the prevalence of the "therapy culture"? In my relatively backward parts, going to a shrink just isn't a thing that "normal" people do, and the threshold for not qualifying as "normal" is pretty high. It would be interesting to see the timeline of how that proliferated in the first world.
Jon Ronson has a podcast series which posits that Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score" brought Trauma to the American masses and many current cultural things (e.g. trigger warnings) are downstream of that book's success.
Maybe everyone does have a little trauma?
If I choose, I can look around my body and see minor scars from various events in my life. Why should my mind be different?
I guess that's a matter of semantics. Do your body scars severely impact your day-to-day functioning and relationships? As Nemoonen said below, trauma shouldn't be "anything that's upsetting"
My scars don't affect me. But I know people with physical issues, like joint problems, which do impact their day-to-day functioning. Other people in the world are "vegetables" due to their physically issues. It's a spectrum. I think it's logical to see physical issues as being of one kind but distinguished in their severity and need for treatment. Similarly for mental issues.
“Does anyone know when/why this trend started”
Tumblr was founded in 2007.
YouTube 2005, too, yeah.
This happens with most psychological labels I think because psychological phenomena tend to have fuzzy boundaries and non-falsifiable subjective elements. In the beginning a label is created to refer to a set of especially specific, obvious, and extreme cases, but the description of those cases doesn't perfectly capture what's going on with them. Then when other people get ahold of the label and description but don't have immediate access to the especially specific, obvious, and extreme cases that inspired it, they're liable to start applying the label to whatever is the most similar person or experience they do have access to. Give this process enough time and the label will become noticeably diluted or at least expanded. This has definitely happened with Autism, OCD, and just about every label ever created to refer to especially unintelligent people (in which case it's an example of the euphemism treadmill).
I propose calling this the "fuzzy diagnosis dilution treadmill" but I'm open to better alternatives to the "fuzzy diagnosis dilution" part.
I think this stems from us trying to figure out trauma as a concept and swinging to a lot of extremes.
Like I think all the following can be true at the same time.
Trauma is a real thing
Trauma is a spectrum versus a binary
Trauma can be used as a signifier by people to get attention or support
Trauma also has the capability to allow us to grow or be hindered (High risk vs high reward, love the concept of antifragility as it relates to this and think the discussion about how people can grow via trauma is under-discussed).
The term you seem to be reaching for is "concept creep". https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/2020-haslam.pdf
"Everyone is traumatized these days. If you don't have big trauma, you can have small trauma. If you don't have PTSD, you can get C-PTSD. Oh you were not abused? But your dad did scream at you, remember? Great, you can have trauma. Welcome"
Because, for better or worse, in contemporary society, victim status entitles the claimant to certain benefits, at least for the right type of victim.
Hence humans carefully cultivate, curate and nurture their victim status.
I'd like to disagree just because too many people are agreeing :P.
Our personalities are shaped by our experiences and our mind's reactions to those experiences. Until recently anyone who couldn't rise above bad experience was considered weak and worthy of scorn in some sense. We're undergoing a pendulum swing in the opposite direction where we admit the self-obvious fact that our past creates us, at least in part. There are bad results to that - people have incentive to make themselves weaker and less tolerant of stress. But there are also bad results to the "get over it" narrative. Perhaps try to have a little compassion and a little patience with that idea.
> I'd like to disagree just because too many people are agreeing :P.
*applause*
I think this is a common phenomenon where society doesn't have a name for something and doesn't discuss it, then someone makes a name for the most extreme version of that thing which is really visually obvious to anyone looking and everyone starts talking about it, then everyone starts using that same language for the less extreme versions that they didn't know how to talk about before but really wanted to.
Like, think in terms of autism, or adhd, or just the whole 'neurotypical' thing in general: in the past, we really didn't acknowledge cognitive diversity very much, and a lot of people felt alienated by their experiences that no one else seemed to acknowledge or share.
Then we started diagnosing the most extreme cases as 'autistic' or 'ADHD' or whatever, and people recognized themselves as having much-less-extreme but qualitatively similar experiences which they'd never been able to talk about and get people to understand or respect before, so they used that same language and suddenly they find other people with the same experiences and society acknowledges them as valid and tries to accommodate them more.
I don't know of a term for this process, but it seems very real and common to me. I think a lot of socjus things like 'opression' or 'privilege' or etc follow similar patterns.
*Is* it implausible that everyone is traumatized? Human existence is pretty traumatizing overall.
I, personally, have had a rather lucky existence. The worst stress that I've had is overshadowed by orders of magnitude by some of the events that have happened to other commenters here. So I'd say that I, and people like me, have not been traumatized by any reasonable interpretation of the term.
But you are bound to a physical body which suffers and might die at any moment, stuck in a world where you are witness to wars and genocides and poverty and I don't know what else with no power to alter them. Yes, you are rather lucky *in comparison to many*, but isn't that like saying the one guy in the mediaeval village who made it through the black plague in good health had "a rather lucky existence"? Or to use the quote that I had in the back of my mind (from R. A. Wilson):
> “Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.”
Wilson is not only wrong, he's *horrifyingly* wrong. His take on this should be considered a destructive mind virus.
That's a bold way to put it. I mean, I don't even buy the idea in its strongest form -- and let me make clear that I view Wilson as one of the "black boxes" emitting a lot of crazy ideas as well as a few good ones that Scott wrote about in one of his old posts, not as any kind of reliable thinker overall. But it seems a basic hypothesis worthy of consideration, and indeed, Scott himself espoused similar sentiments in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma . Would you mind elaborating?
The best part from this article:
> I’m nervous about the creeping expansion of “trauma”. On the one hand, it’s good that people who feel traumatized by things can have access to trauma-related resources and have other people respect/validate their suffering. On the other, it might be dangerous to create an expectation of traumatic consequences for minor wrongs.
And that's precisely Wilson's problem here. He has a massively expansionist definition of a concept that is in great need of being narrowed. Trauma is not stress. Trauma is not discomfort. Trauma *very much is not* a bad experience that happened to you, and screw the people who put that into the DSM! They're a big part of the problem here.
Trauma is lasting damage, and nothing less than lasting damage is trauma. Trauma is when something bad happens to you *and it breaks you,* at least a little bit. Two people can have the same bad experience happen to them, and one becomes traumatized and the other gets over it and goes on with their life just fine.
This raises the obvious question, "why does one person become traumatized and the other does not? What's the difference between them?" And the best answer we have is "past bad experiences that have been faced successfully." It's known as antifragility, and is basically a formal, scientific expression of the notion that "that which does not kill me makes me stronger."
Antifragility is a fundamental principle of human development. It's not at all controversial that this is true for our bodies; what is exercise if not deliberate, prolonged, low-level abuse specifically because we know it's good for us in the long run. But it's just as true for our psyches, and this is where we run into trouble, because if that which does not kill me makes me stronger, then being shielded from that which would not have killed me keeps me weak.
Treating people as if they are fragile, rather than antifragile, is one of the worst forms of abuse it is possible to perpetrate against them. And that is the essence of Wilson's claim here: that the stresses of ordinary life universally traumatize all people, rather than that they provide opportunities for them to grow and become better.
Thank you for the detailed expansion. I think there are two valid issues at work in your argument. One about semantic creep ("trauma" in the narrow sense means a specific thing, it's useful to have a word about that thing that doesn't apply to everybody), the other about optics/cognitohazards (maybe telling people that the real world is so awful it should traumatize them will cause them to actually be more traumatized).
As concerns the first, I agree this is true and that we should find another word for the broader thing, but the broader thing might still be a real thing deserving of its own coinage! "These new lands aren't actually part of the Asian continent, stop calling those people Indians, that's just confusing" is a valid statement but doesn't disprove the existence of the American landmass.
As to the second, again, your argument is true but seems orthogonal to the truth of the claim. Ideas can be true *and* dangerous mind-viruses, simultaneously. At some point you do need to talk about the true thing -- you just have to make sure you do it with other intellectuals who've been vaccinated against the mind-virus, instead of shouting it from the rooftops.
The most common version of this (which I'm sure is very familiar to Scott) is that there are plenty of people who have clinical depression which you would worsen if you're too quick to agree with their self-pitying about how much their life sucks… but also, their life does objectively suck. The solution to this problem is to not talk about it *to the depressed guy*, but if you're talking to a mutual friend about ways to maybe improve the guy's life, separate from trying to cure his depression, you should be able to say "yeah, I agree, Gary's life does indeed suck, let's do a fundraiser to help him out" without worrying that it will get back to him and worsen his depression.
Similarly, "the base level of awfulness humans experience is nonzero, and might be enough to screw with everybody's head at least a *little* relative to what the average citizen's mental health would look like in a utopia, even if we try very hard to toughen them up and/or make them look at the bright side"… feels like it could be true even if it's unwise to call random people's attention to that fact. And if it's true, then verifying it seems important, both for purposes of setting a target for what level of mental health we can realistically achieve, and for how optimistic we can be about the impact on people's quality of life if we *did* manage to end war/poverty/death/???.
> there are plenty of people who have clinical depression which you would worsen if you're too quick to agree with their self-pitying about how much their life sucks… but also, their life does objectively suck.
My go-to response to this is, "yes, what happened to you sucks. It wasn't your fault. But you're still responsible for your own choices." Empathy is important, and it's equally important not to let empathy cross the line into enabling.
> Similarly, "the base level of awfulness humans experience is nonzero, and might be enough to screw with everybody's head at least a *little* relative to what the average citizen's mental health would look like in a utopia
I would argue that wokeness is evidence against that thesis. By every objective metric, conditions today are massively better for American women and for black Americans then they were 60 years ago, and conditions 60 years ago were massively better for both groups than they were 100 years ago. And yet, somehow, the better things get, the louder we hear people screaming about what massive problems our society allegedly has with sexism and racism!
I'm reminded of the "hygiene hypothesis," the notion that allergies and autoimmune conditions develop primarily due to the rampaging army of destroyers that is our immune system lacking a sufficient quantity of legitimate pathogens to fight in a modern, largely sterilized environment, so they turn on other, more harmless things and declare them The Enemy. We've got thousands of years of human civilization selecting for struggle and tribalism as positive survival traits. It's become an inborn part of human nature by this point, and those instincts don't see piddling little details like "we no longer have any good reason to behave that way" as a good reason not to behave that way.
> My go-to response to this is, "yes, what happened to you sucks. It wasn't your fault. But you're still responsible for your own choices." Empathy is important, and it's equally important not to let empathy cross the line into enabling.
Well, yes, that's what you need to tell *Gary*, all else being equal. But I feel like this misses part of my point, which is that sometimes you actually have the power to make Gary's life suck less, and you need to talk about the ways in which it sucks (to talk about them with people who are not Gary) *in order to improve them*. As part of this conversation, you might even -- gasp! -- have to discuss the possibility that all clinical depression aside, making Gary's life suck less might in fact make him happier on net.
I read the Wilson quote not as an invitation to self-pity, but as a call to action. "You don't understand. The people you think of as 'okay' are not 'okay'. *You* are not actually 'okay', nobody is, we could *all* be so much happier if we as humans got our shit together and got rid of homelessness/wars/disease/etc.! Stop telling yourself you should just learn to be happy with your lot, your lot is breadcrumbs and there's a cake right over there." And that reading resonates very strongly with me.
Endlessly picking at scabs is a failure mode, but you do need some way to notice that you're covered in bruises as a first step to actually going to a hospital and getting better. Wokeness does tend to prioritize scab-picking over actual, er, progress… but I think it's the failure mode of a necessary process. (Relatedly, my own gut feeling for *why* woke discourse falls into this trap so much is that it's *because* we've already come so far. The ideal world is now so close that we can almost taste it… so close that any remaining imperfections, however small, start to feel intolerable.)
Honestly, it's interesting to see just how much of this is simply repackaged Christianity, with the overt spiritual elements removed and actively rejected but the basic doctrines remaining intact.
> The people you think of as 'okay' are not 'okay'. *You* are not actually 'okay', nobody is
"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."
"There is none righteous, no, not one."
> we could *all* be so much happier if we as humans got our shit together and got rid of homelessness/wars/disease/etc.
"Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law ... turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper withersoever thou goest."
> Stop telling yourself you should just learn to be happy with your lot, your lot is breadcrumbs and there's a cake right over there.
"Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for those who love Him."
> Endlessly picking at scabs is a failure mode, but you do need some way to notice that you're covered in bruises as a first step to actually going to a hospital and getting better.
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
> I think it's the failure mode of a necessary process.
I think it's failing because of the removal of a necessary process. Wokeness takes fundamentally Christian goals and tries to accomplish them by other means, and one important doctrine it abandons by the wayside is the doctrine of repentance and forgiveness of sin: that the atonement of Jesus Christ enables you to turn away from your past, that the things you have done wrong can be washed away and no longer remain stuck on your record. Take out the spiritual doctrine of atonement for sins, and it probably shouldn't be surprising that the possibility of repentance gets thrown out alongside it, and all we're left with is recognizing and confessing past wrongs and being trapped in them forever.
> Relatedly, my own gut feeling for *why* woke discourse falls into this trap so much is that it's *because* we've already come so far. The ideal world is now so close that we can almost taste it… so close that any remaining imperfections, however small, start to feel intolerable.
I would say it's, again, because they've lost an important spiritual doctrine: the eternal reward of the righteous in Heaven. If you're running on an atheist philosophy that there is no afterlife, if this life is all that we have, then what choice do your fundamentally Christian principles of righteousness and justice leave you with but to attempt to establish some form of Heaven on Earth, by any means necessary? But because that was never the real plan, it always fails catastrophically.
Many Thanks!
>Yes, you are rather lucky _in comparison to many_, but isn't that like saying the one guy in the mediaeval village who made it through the black plague in good health had "a rather lucky existence"?
Ok, but I don't think there is any _absolute_ standard. Also, for "traumatized" to be a useful term (at least as a binary predicate) it has to select a proper subset of humans, otherwise it just reduces to "human".
I would say the standard should be humans living in Utopia/Heaven/The Better World Of Tomorrow.
That is, I think you can't have progress if you're unwilling to say "maybe a lot of people are sad and in pain, not because they're insufficiently tough, or because it's unavoidable, but because there's a lot of misery in the world that we could actually physically alleviate!!".
From our point of view in the developed world in the 21st century, we can pity a medieval peasant who thought "I survived the plague, only one of my children has died in infancy, and no warlord has invaded this parish for twenty years -- indeed I am blessed by the Lord!" was as good as it got; that the path to happiness was to accept this state of affair as an upper ceiling on human flourishing, and make one's peace with it.
Things can get better -- the basic amount of suffering that the average human has to witness can and does go down over time -- and if we believe that, then it's reasonable to acknowledge that even the luckiest of us are in many ways much less than maximally lucky. (Albeit perhaps in ways that are hard to conceptualize until we crack our equivalent of "invent medicine and human rights".)
Or to put it yet another way, I think "there's an absolute objective standard for how mentally healthy the average human should be" vs. "the notion that everyone in the world might be less than healthy due to the world being bad is meaningless" isn't, actually, a binary. I think you can gesture at "we're nowhere near optimal conditions" even without a rigorous definition of what optimal looks like.
(As per my reply to Bob Frank earlier in this thread, I'm sympathetic to the idea that the word "trauma" is unsuitable to talk about "the background-radiation screwed-up-ness that we might all be suffering from due to, like, the awareness of our own mortality". But that doesn't mean the latter isn't a real, and important, thing to talk about. I'm open to suggestions about what we could call it, so long as it's a name that doesn't imply it's an unavoidable fact of life.)
Many Thanks! Well, I certainly agree that progress is possible. We (in the 1st world) _are_ better off than our medieval ancestors. At any given time, with the technology of that time, there is a currently-best-feasible human condition.
>I'm sympathetic to the idea that the word "trauma" is unsuitable to talk about "the background-radiation screwed-up-ness that we might all be suffering from
Agreed. I don't have any compact suggestions for a term for this.
I mean, to share my own perspective on feeling traumatized by my dad screaming at me (and hitting me, but mostly screaming)... It doesn't feel like a self-defeating view of myself.
I didn't *choose* to having fits of panic when authority figures shouted at me. I certainly didn't think "Oh, hey, my dad screamed at me, that counts as trauma, right, so I get to cry in front of my boss when he summons me to his office!". Society certainly didn't encourage me to have these intense reactions, quite the contrary.
In fact, I remember the causality pointing the other way: I had a bunch of symptoms that I eventually noticed; after noticing them I went "Huh, I wonder if this has something to do with how my dad used to scream at me", and *then* I started grasping for words like "trauma" and "abuse"; before I noticed the symptoms, I very much thought those words were for other people completely different from me.
I don't know how representative I am of the average self-reporting traumatized person, but I suspect my experiences are much closer to the norm than hdvill's smug dismissive portrayal of them.
> I suspect my experiences are much closer to the norm than hdvill's smug dismissive portrayal of them.
FWIW, they match my own experiences.
This somehow makes me think about your post on UtEB (Mental Mountains). If the parts in IFS are the valleys in our mental landscape, then the demons Falconer describes might be those that are particularly cut off from the rest of the terrain.
It probably shouldn't be shocking, but I found it shocking how strongly this whole thing reminded me of Twin Peaks.
Mostly these are the situations you’d expect - child abuse and rape - but a surprising number of them say they got in during a childhood surgery. Falconer is appropriately puzzled, and wonders if maybe the disembodiment of anesthesia provides an opening.
That bit is straight out of an episode of Babylon 5:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Believers_(Babylon_5)
"Dr. Franklin faces an ethical dilemma when the parents of Shon, a dying alien child refuse to let him operate for religious reasons. Their son is suffering from an eventually fatal respiratory ailment. Franklin is confident he can save Shon, with surgery, but the family's alien religion prohibits surgery, believing that cutting into a body will release the spirit, reducing the body to something worse than death. They mention it as something only done to food animals in their culture.
...With Shon near death, his parents spend more time with him before they depart; as soon as they leave, Franklin decides to operate against orders. The operation is a success, and Franklin proves to Shon that his spirit has not changed, but when Shon's parents arrive, they treat him as an soulless demon and abandon him. They eventually return for him saying that they have brought his "travel robe" and are going to take him "to rest." After they leave Franklin checks Hernandez's notes on the species in the medical database and realizes that the boy was wearing a robe used in spiritual journeys, not physical ones. He runs to the family's quarters fearing the implication that "journey" in this case provides, but it is too late. The parents have already ritually slain the boy."
If sleep and anaesthesia are indeed interruptions in consciousness and the "self" ceases to exist during those periods, then it would be possible for another entity to usurp the vacant throne at that time?
Coming at this as a practicing therapist (LMSW) a few years in and still developing his therapeutic model with patients.
I've read and used some IFS principles, but very much from the standpoint of "This isn't a literal different person/energy/demon inside of you, but more of a metaphorical way for you to connect with 'parts' of yourself you might not like or deny". My experience working around therapists, I am not surprised in the least it can devolve into literal demon hunting. It is why I gravitated toward Scott's work, I found my scientific training in graduate school to be lacking.
I very much agree with the concept around theory of mind and how our culture strongly influences how we think about ourselves. That is what I want to focus this post on because I think this is exactly where therapy interventions can be most effective.
Which hits on the main point I want to make: part of the human experience is that we can make meaning out of absolutely anything and this is an effective tool when conducting therapy that doesn't have to run counter to scientific reality (Or at least I hope it doesn't).
Focusing on various mental illnesses as being a misfire of the brain is both correct but also 1) Not a very compelling story for people (They are gonna feel pretty helpless, how does one control the brain to not misfire?) 2) Discounts the evidence we have about how powerful our minds are to shape us mentally and physically (See giving ourselves mental illnesses in certain circumstances, psychosomatic pain etc.)
I don't think its controversial or even unscientific to say that the mind is a powerful tool we can use to help people get better. That means leaning into meaning making (Why "Mans Search for Meaning" is my golden tome as far as I am concerned for private practice), stories and self-narratives that a patient can believe in. I don't want to paint these as all being equal, we can absolutely tell ourselves some pretty fucking destructive stories about ourselves and the world that both "heal" us and also lead to a more precarious reality.
I see my role as helping to guide patient's to better meaning and stories they can believe in, because ultimately all of our meaning and story making is a choice and somewhat arbitrary.
I think this begs the question of what IS a demon or other alleged "spiritual entity", what exactly does such a term even mean?
All this, and you didn't reference the time *you* encountered a demonic possession? From the "Geography of Madness" book review:
>I have seen exactly one demonic possession case in my ten years as a psychiatrist. The man fell to the ground, mouth foaming, chanting strange syllables and the names of Biblical demons. My attending doctor at the time - one of those people who somehow manages to be an expert in everything - was an expert in demonic possession, and told us that he was in no way psychotic, antipsychotics wouldn’t help him (except insofar as they help everyone by decreasing all behaviors), and he needed to “work through his issues”. The patient was uncooperative - he was only visiting MDs because the local bishop wouldn’t call in an exorcist until he got a psych exam - and eventually left against medical advice.
The reason Falconer hasn't come across any patients who shoot fire out of their eyes during exorcisms is obviously just because all the demons competent enough to do that sort of thing would never let their humans make it to a therapist's office in the first place. A demon like that is usually only noticed by the people who have to live with the possessed person, and the demon/possessed person usually manages their reputation well enough that anyone accusing them of possession will be labeled as a head case long before the possessed person themselves is ever suspected of having something wrong with them.
This is the thing that worries me, reading stuff like this. The first thing that comes to mind is a certain episode from Acts chapter 19. Most people encountering a demonic spirit lack both the knowledge of how to deal with one and the authority to do so, and attempting to manipulate them through other means is a good way to either end up in trouble or to be tricked into thinking you've been successful when you haven't.
This is Falconer's theory too.
Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's plausible. Powerful demons are so powerful that they manage to do... roughly nothing. Not exactly a falsifiable belief.
Reminds me of conservation of expected evidence - the fact that we don't find a japanese conspiracy planning to bring down the US just proves how sneaky and dangerous they are... hmmm. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jiBFC7DcCrZjGmZnJ/conservation-of-expected-evidence
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was teaching people how to reason well enough that they could rationalize away their god-given all-consuming paranoia in the face of the devil's endless five-dimensional-chess-like machinations.
> Powerful demons are so powerful that they manage to do... roughly nothing.
Maybe... to borrow from an earlier post of Scott's, power is anti-correlated with ambition among the demons on earth, because the metric for "do they go to earth and mess with humans" is limited to a narrow band. Any demons more powerful and more ambitious have better things to do, and demons that are neither powerful nor ambitious don't even make it up here.
Is everybody on this rationalist blog now accepting the existence of demons?
Only as a hypothetical for the purpose of conversation?
I have to admit a strong temptation to turn caustically sarcastic about this. I've been keeping it to light snark, in the interests of not adding a hostile tone to the conversations here.
I read this essay and find myself thinking: “it sounds like therapy is still where medicine was in ~1700,” I.e. still doing blood letting and without the germ theory of disease. That may be my preexisting biases shining through.
Interestingly, my wife just finished some kind of IFS training for using IFS with psychedelic medicine. I didn’t really understand why one would want to combine the two, but it does seem like, if the therapist wants to elicit “parts” or “demons” or what have you, psychedelics are a way of doing so.
Giving psychedelics to borderlines, however, sounds like a terrible idea.
That does indeed sound like a recipe for disaster, imo. And I'm an advocate for psychedelics.
About 10 years ago I did a superficially similar kind of therapy called Voice Dialogue. It was a little woo in that it drew from Buddhism, but nowhere near the degree of IFS. No trance states or other nonsense. Just an attempt to clarify what my conflicting impulses are, and how to get them more aligned.
One massive error in assumption, in the footnotes. Schwartz in the seventies went to a radical new program of training on family systems that completely ignored interior experience as outmoded and Freudian and unscientific.
> Luckily, demons apparently have to tell the truth about this? If you ask them point-blank whether they’re a demon, they’ll try to stall and dither. But if you really press the question they almost always admit it.
I don't really see a problem here; the tradition is very old that, while otherworldly entities might not be bound by the same rules that apply to us, they definitely are bound by special rules that apply to them.
It's not narratively odd, but it massively complicates the empirical claim. "There are malevolent non-physical intelligences" could be true in any number of world-models; stipulate that they are bound by rules of truthfulness and we're already sliding into more specific theological models.
Isn't the empirical claim just that, based on past experience, this is a good way of identifying them?
Why do you need any theological model?
No, I mean it would complexify the assumptions baked into "the phenomena described earlier are caused by real otherworldly entities who have a separate existence from the patient", if we consider it as a claim about the world. If all we observe is "there are voices in some people's heads who claim to have a separate existence, can be made to go away, and have seemingly consistent stories about being afraid to join some kind of light", then, although it's still a tall order for any reductionist, we could grant the claim some level of probability *without* even becoming theists, let alone accepting any specific belief system. (Maybe the 'demons' are interdimensional phase-shifters or something. Who knows?) Whereas if you add in that they follow superstitions about having to tell the truth etc., then you're narrowing it down a fair bit from "there are invisible minds floating around, we don't know why or how they work".
Well, yes, everything else you say about them necessarily means you're narrowing the definition of what they are.
Wouldn't this be just as much of a problem for the claim that they respond to exorcisms?
Not the kind of "exorcism" described in the post, which are otherwise more like "bargain with the demon until it agrees to goes away" and less like "say specific magic words to banish it". (I think "you can bargain with them" is implicit in the initial claim of "there are intelligences you can talk to", so it brings no additional complexity points.)
Really? There are plenty of things you can talk to that don't care to any degree what you say.
There are more things that might be happy to negotiate over some points and unwilling to negotiate over others. Generally, there is no point in trying to negotiate something into killing itself, which is what we appear to be doing here.
Only in the materialist framework that these really are just parts of the patients' brain! The whole idea of them being demons is that they have a separate existence from the patient, which began before they entered the patient, and will continue after they leave. (Whether it's to possess somebody else or cross over to some vaguely afterlife-y alternate plane of reality.)
No, also in the framework where we think these are metaphysical entities and we only ever observe them as they exist in human hosts. A tapeworm works the same way.
There are a few other problems with your position here:
- Everything you say continues to define the demons more narrowly, which you claim to be against. The idea that demons must continue to exist after being exorcised comes from you! I think this is an incoherent position on your part. Defining things more narrowly is the entire concept of empirical evidence. All additional knowledge means narrower definitions, and all narrower definitions mean additional knowledge. Complaining that a manual for solving a particular problem describes some facets of the problem is... weird.
- You also don't expect to be able to negotiate ticks off, or bureaucrats out of collecting taxes, or farmers into becoming ranchers. These things don't lead to immediate death, but they fundamentally conflict with the organism's lifestyle, and do lead to death or death-analogues if the negotiations repeat. If, every time you see a particular kind of being, it is engaged in the same characteristic behavior, you would not expect it to be willing to stop, ever.
I think this is less of a problem and more of a logical circle: under the described methodology, those demons who do not admit being demons, are considered to be Parts and not demons.
“Send the dubious Parts warm compassionate energy from your Self, tell them there’s no reason to be scared, and promise that’ll take care of them once the demon is gone.”
It seems like it would be much more natural to say “promise that you’ll take care of them…”. Scott, are you using voice-transcription software? (or do you think you have a tendency for phonetic typos?)
Well, gosh.
You try and drive religion out and it will come back some way. The parts about making sure it's a demon etc. sound very similar to doing exorcisms in Catholicism:
https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/sacraments-and-sacramentals/sacramentals-blessings/exorcism
"When and how is an afflicted member of the faithful referred to an exorcist?
It is advisable that every diocese establish a protocol to respond to inquiries made by the faithful who claim to be demonically afflicted. As part of the protocol, an assessment should occur to determine the true state of the person.Only after a thorough examination including medical, psychological, and psychiatric testing might the person be referred to the exorcist for a final determination regarding demonic possession. To be clear, the actual determination of whether a member of the faithful is genuinely possessed by the devil is made by the Church, even if individuals claim to be possessed through their own self-diagnosis or psychosis."
I'll note that the Amazon.com site shelves this book under "Books > Medical Books > Psychology" while Amazon.co.uk classifies it as "Religion & Spirituality› New Age› Occult"
Also, what is it with every woo peddler and fast-buck merchant stealing Catholic iconography? Great Mystery Press redirects back to Falconer's website, and it's a version of iconography of the Sacred Heart (but the traditional one doesn't have wings or barbed wire for the crown of thorns). I suppose this is the downside of being massively successfully at generating global branding: everyone wants to copy it!
https://aleteia.org/2018/06/21/the-sacred-heart-how-its-devotional-images-developed-over-time/
> Well, gosh.
> You try and drive religion out and it will come back some way.
"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
— Francis Bacon
I wonder if Muslim patients seeking this form of therapy complain about djinns... :-)
> Also, what is it with every woo peddler and fast-buck merchant stealing Catholic iconography?
No offense to the Orthodox literal iconography, but IMHO Catholics simply have the best iconography of any religion, period. Maybe think of this imitation as flattery? :-)
Yep, this is really something else (as a fellow Catholic).
I've been silent on this thread for a while. A couple of weeks ago I posted in one of the open forums, has anyone heard about this IFS thing? And only a few had. Suddenly it's everywhere. But here I am having done parts work before it was cool.
So to the point: Through all my IFS work I was just a few thoughts away from "jeez, it would be so easy to take this thing, decide a part isn't so good as Schwartz's book says it is, take its origin from my own mind and put it elsewhere, and bang, I can disown that unfortunate habit or desire.
Which doesn't mean it's not a viable possibility. Just that it would be so, so easy to spin it that way.
As someone who is familiar with Vajrayana Buddhism, I find this hilarious.
The IFS guys are catching criticism from
a) Scientific Rationalists, who are objecting on the grounds that Demons Do Not Exist.
b) Christians or a certain sort, who think that demons do, in fact, exist, and that this is a terrible way of dealing with them.
Meanwhile, any Buddhist practitioner of Chöd will be aware of an extensive discussion of the non-existence of demons, in for example, the teachings of Machig Labdron. ("Park's closed. Moose out front should have told you." No, scratch that. "Your tantric empowerment for visualising yourself as Troma Nagmo should have explained this to you in the _tri_, the philosophical explanation you were given along with the reading transmission of the text.")
See, for example, Machik's Complete Explanation: Clarifying the Meaning of Chod (translated by Sarah Harding) for the Vajrayana Buddhist version of the Demons Do Not Exist discussion,
The following is my personal opinion and maybe not official Buddhist orthodoxy...
We talk a lot about akrasia in ACX circles. Suppose you know you ought to tidy up your room (or whatever) but. strangely, find yourself unable to just do it. Yes, obviously, western psychiatry has a name for that, and its name is depression. But .. that conflict of the "self" .. you want to do the thing and the thing? What on Earth is that? maybe, a glimpse, that may well be familiar to many, into what the Buddhist discourse along the lines of "Demons obviously don't exist, and yet here we are performing elaborate rituals about them" is trying to get at.
It might be useful at this point to clarify that the "trunk" IFS concept is that all your parts come from you, they are protectors you spawned to deal with problems and memories too painful to cope with yourself when you were (generally) too young to know better, all of them intended good for you even though the firefighters might burn your house down, and you have a nice fluffy Self in the middle of it all who's all compassionate and cool about everyone and everything, if only you can access it, which is hard but doable.
I've got a flippant tone here, but I do feel (minus the demonic bit) IFS is a good recipe to deal with and integrate trauma and not-quite-trauma without doing more harm than good, and people can self-heal with minimal guidance, or at least I did. Not all the way. But more than I could do by myself.
I'm a Catholic so the demonic bit is a part of my life (whether I think it's real or not; CS Lewis has a great line on that in the intro to Screwtape Letters. I've seen too many people have, um, unproductive thoughts on the matter.) I think a good middle way is "if they are what the CC says they are, the less traffic with them the better, and it's too tempting to blame them for stuff I need to own, so the hell with them."
>we’re not holding Demon Awareness Campaigns in random middle schools full of impressionable kids
I'm sure you wrote this line explicitely for us to ask: "or are we?"
We do, just the current religion calls them "biases"
I'll preface this by saying that I'm a scholar of intellectual history, not a clinician.
There's ALREADY an intellectual-clinical community that's centered around trying to find a responsible vocabulary to articulate and respond to the experience that there is something within us that is not ourselves, which seems to have desires and inclinations that we cannot identify with, and which can be hostile to our conscious selves. It's just that Strachey robbed the English-speaking world of the visceral vividness of the "IT" in contrast to the "I" when he translated Freud's German.
Lacan takes hold of this experience and makes it the core of his thought. The stuff about the "other" in Lacan is about finding a language to understand that my relation to the IT within me and the other person outside of me overlap and intermingle in very complex ways, and that in many ways it makes a lot of sense to understand the IT "inside me" is the fragment of interpersonal structures external and antecedent to my own consciousness.
It really seems like a good Freudian-Lacanian can get you most of the pay-off of IFS therapy (or IFS-exorcisms?!?) without the bizarre metaphysical commitments. It's not perfect, but it's better than frigging excorcisms!
(Since this comes up every time I've mentioned Lacan: Bruce Fink's "The Lacanian Subject" is far and away the best introduction to a sane Lacanianism. Most others are written for people trying to piece together his (often very interesting) intersections with French philosophy, which are not useful for a clinician.)
I read Fink and couldn't really understand him - see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-a-clinical-introduction for my review.
I remember that review! Ironically, that is one of Fink's books that I haven't read, so I can't comment. I remember reading his "Lacan to the Letter" and thinking it was a waste of a few hours, so I think his quality can vary quite a bit.
If I was inclined to try and sell you on reading another Fink book, I'd say that the hardest part of Lacan is how austerely formal his idea of the subject is, how counter-intuitive it is to that Western model of the monolithic and integrated self, and how rigorously, even to the point of absurdity he works with that model rather than the culturally embedded assumptions of what a "person" is. In your Fink review, you talked about the difficulty of fitting various Lacanian "stories" together--and I think that part of what's going on is that you need a very odd model of the subject to make them work.
This book is the best introduction to the Lacanian model of the subject, hands down. To be fair, that's a very low bar to clear--but it's the best attempt to try and piece what Lacan's trying to say on the subjec. Plus it's rather short.
“…he keeps getting new demons, one after another, and this seems common for the IFS therapists who deal with demons most frequently.”
This is notable from an orthodox Christian perspective in that if you’re going to be nice to demons when speaking with them, you should expect more of them to keep coming around and bothering *you*. This is also a common trope in various legends and myths about monsters and spirits, like the vampire who can’t come in your house without the master of the house first inviting them in. The Hitchhiker Effect is a more modern version of this phenomenon.
This phenomenon being operative across multiple legends, religions, and cultures—even materialistic ones like ours—would seem to suggest there’s something real here and not just a fevered imagination (although that too can be operative).
As a Christian in America, I’m of the perspective that anyone treating “demons” should exhaust all the materialistic explanations first, and only then, if all else fails, resort to exorcism. IIRC that’s also how Catholic and Orthodox exorcists tend to operate.
Matthew 12:43-45 immediately springs to mind when reading this part of the article...
And then there's this ....
Randomized Controlled Trial of Tibetan Buddhist Feeding Your Demons® Contemplative Process in Meditation Practitioners
Study conducted by Philippe Goldin (University of California, Davis), Eve Ekman (University of California, San Francisco), and Amy Braun (Stanford University)
So, ok, randomized controlled trials from Western experimental psychology meets Tibetan demonology. Fine. (Note: I'm not suggesting that they are wrong here).
What was the result and the control group?
"Objectives: To investigate outcomes and predictors of a Tibetan Buddhist meditation process called Feeding Your Demons® (FYD) vs. a waitlist (WL) control group of meditation practitioners with moderate depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. Methods: 61 meditators (70% female; mean age = 44.05, SD = 11.20; 43.5% White, 39% Asian, 9.3% Hispanic, 8.3% other) were randomly assigned to 1-month of FYD practice or WL groups. Participants completed self-report assessments at baseline and post-FYD/WL. Results: Intention-to-treat analysis found that, compared to WL, FYD yielded significantly greater decreases in stress symptoms and increases in self-compassion. Moderator analyses showed baseline lesser history of psychiatric problems (but not number of years of meditation practice) predicted greater reduction in depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. Regression analyses found that the number of FYD sessions completed predicted post-FYD increases in self-compassion and satisfaction with life, as well as decreases in stress, depression, and intolerance for uncertainty. Conclusions: FYD practice may enhance multiple facets of psychological health in adults in a dose dependent manner. An RCT with an active comparison training is necessary to determine the specificity of FYD related effects and to identify mechanisms of change."
Related personal anecdote:
I underwent some IFS therapy for depression for about a year or so in the mid 2010s. I found it useful in improving my mental health, though not completely transformational (that just had to wait for me to finish graduate school). My therapist presented it to me more in terms of metaphor/potential way of thinking. As an applied mathematician used to thinking in terms of models, who also aesthetically likes narrative/personified stories (c.f. Moloch or Sanderson's "Spren"), I found that it really resonated with me. I still find myself thinking in IFS terms to sort through strange reactions sometimes.
I'll note none of the demon stuff came up in any form (though both myself and my therapist are orthodox Christians who are at minimum open to the potential reality of demonic posession)
"People see the inside of their mind the way their culture tells them to see it."
...a good sentence, worth highlighting.
I'd want to know how many of the patients already believed in demons. If prior belief is important, there should be more demon infestation for Catholics and some Protestants, dybbuk-style possession for Chasidic and maybe some other Jews, and less infestation for third generation atheists and people who default to materialism.
A sober review, and of an interesting topic. I don't think I would have encountered anything like this elsewhere. Thank you.
I like the joke buried in that question mark. Very nice.
So I'm an atheist and am having a hard time even putting enough credence behind "demons did it" to evaluate it seriously.
But recently I've had lots of interactions with ideas about spirituality and criticism of the idea of a unified self. And I think I'm a better person for it. Not because I buy any of the spiritual stuff, but because the ability to "chunk" my thoughts into several entities instead of one clear ego has obvious advantages. The idea that the state of my body impacts the state of my mind has obvious advantages. Treating the body as a system made up of multiple organisms, only some of which you directly control has obvious advantages.
Were I in a culture where that was the norm I hope I'd eventually realize that being unified in purpose has obvious advantages. That believing my mind can overcome physical limitations has obvious advantages. That treating my mind as ascendant above my environment and inputs has obvious advantages.
I know you've written about this before but IMO any new therapy paradigm is likely to have good results, even if it's absolute nonsense. Because the way to fix a broken mind is to think laterally, and you can't do that if you're using paradigms your culture has already absorbed.
Just the *title* gives me flashbacks to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/daemon#Noun_2
I once discovered (experimentally) that I had a daemon. I used to be subject to substantial orthostatic hypotension, short-term drop in blood pressure (to the brain) upon standing up. (The cure for an episode is to avoid falling over for 10 to 30 seconds until your heart accelerates and raises your blood pressure.) Eliding most of the details, I once had an episode that was severe enough to clear the short-term memory of my conscious mind, but it turns out it did *not* clear the memory of the part of my brain that remembers and executes walking a path through the environment. Once my vision cleared and my fine motor control resumed, I walked the somewhat complicated path that I had decided to walk pre-episode, but it was only after I had executed some turns that my conscious mind recovered where I was, what I was doing, and where I intended to go.
12+ year therapist here, including IFS. I can confirm that things like what Falconer and others describe as "demons" do come up in IFS very rarely, but in my experience... yeah they're definitely just parts like any other parts, sorry. They don't "need" to be "exorcized" in any special way, they're just resistant to the usual script because the fundamental assumptions baked into that script don't apply to them; they are *not* like other parts, but that doesn't mean they're otherworldly in any way.
(Yes, I am basically just telling Falconer and others like him to "git gud," but maybe Falconer would just reply back that if I've never had to do an exorcism, then clearly haven't met a "real demon" yet. To which I say, fair enough.)
To put it more clearly, my counterargument, the elephant in the room underlying all this, is that most modern people get weirded out by the possibility of humans having actual anti-social personality traits within them as "real parts" that are *actually part of them.*
Like... if you take the idea of a non-unitary mind seriously, which I do for many (most(?) (but definitely not all)) people, it seems obvious that murderers are not the only people who, to some degree, "want" to murder others. That is to say, many people who are not-murderers have a part that wants to murder, or even rape or torture, others. And they just... do a better job integrating, negotiation, suppressing, sublimating, or inhibiting these parts than the people who DO end up acting on those parts.
Which, I expect, is a fairly scary thing to notice about one's self! And if you're in a culture that talks about demons, then "demons, of course!" must surely be kind of a relief to realize. Especially if you can't just blame the part on trauma or protectiveness, which the default IFS scripts would take for granted. Which means you and the client need a different orientation to those parts; one that accepts them for what they are, without encouraging them, and finds a path toward integration that's going to be a bit more unique compared to most.
The relevant question, of course, is which style is more effective. If Falconer and others get good results by doing this, and they're not convincing people who don't already believe in demons... then yeah, more power to them. But what if most IFS therapists are in fact only going to be able to deal with these "demons" the Falconer way?
...I dunno, man. CBT done right is good, but most therapists can't even do CBT right. Sign me up for "hold the line at therapists not telling their clients they're infested by demons," regardless of what the therapist themself believes.
(Unless, *maybe*, their client is steeped in a heavy religious culture already, insists that demons are real, etc. In that case I'd understand the therapist sighing and rolling up their sleeves and "meets the client where they're at" and calls it a demon, but in my experience this still sits badly. I've never felt comfortable when clients fervently believed I had magic powers before, and I'm suspicious of any therapist who invites such, even if they actually do believe in magic.)
Oh that's another thing. It does not surprise me that many IFS therapists might end up actually believing in real demons and spiritual possession and so on, because why wouldn't they? Base rates hold in lots of even Master's degree level Westerners believing in supernatural things. Even default Western Skepticism is not sufficiently good epistemology to defend against bad interpretations of patterns that match to "demons."
Another minor thing worth noting... the article talks a lot about lucid-dream-like-trance-states where people do IFS work and I'm sitting here scratching my head. I don't do this with my clients ever for IFS work, and I've never heard others who do it talk about this as a standard procedure. Maybe we missed the memo on why that's important or necessary, but for anyone who thinks IFS requires this... it super duper doesn't, and I think putting clients in a more suggestive state before they talk about their parts unnecessarily adds a lot of woo and potential risk of suggestibility for no good reason. Maybe some people "need" it to be able to talk to their parts, but I'm tempted in those cases to say that they should just use a different modality altogether.
Lots of therapy seems very roll-up-your-sleeves. Like, you want good results. It seems at least possible that exorcising your patients’ demon might help. I guess I wouldn’t personally do it because I think that would require me to start lying and keeping track of what religious beliefs I told my patients and which wouldn’t work.
I think that the lucid dream state stuff mostly refers to getting the person to surface and communicate with the part. If you grant the part existential status, then no dream state is needed. If you think it’s all metaphors, then I guess the dream state is helpful?
>Like... if you take the idea of a non-unitary mind seriously, which I do for many (most(?) (but definitely not all)) people, it seems obvious that murderers are not the only people who, to some degree, "want" to murder others. That is to say, many people who are not-murderers have a part that wants to murder, or even rape or torture, others. And they just... do a better job integrating, negotiation, suppressing, sublimating, or inhibiting these parts than the people who DO end up acting on those parts.
>Which, I expect, is a fairly scary thing to notice about one's self!
Scary? Does the average person make it through a whole career without ever wanting to murder one of their bosses? I'd guess that this would be a rather prosaic impulse. And choosing not to act on the impulse, since one doesn't want a prison term, would be similarly prosaic.
I think there's a big difference between an "impulse" to hurt someone for cause, and a "part" that consistently wants to murder others, whether for a reason or just for its own sake.
Many Thanks! Ok, that is a reasonable distinction. _Consistently_ wanting to murder others (whether as a "unitary" preference or as a "part" of one's wants) seems much less common.
I think you have inoculated me against “demons”.
Reading the post, I really resonated with demons descriptions. And I was scared/surprised to find out there’s a simple solution — in other words, I bought into the idea.
However, reading your comment I’m
more convinced that it’s not actually this simple, and probably there’s still real work of integration that needs to be done.
Two more points:
I am personally not ashamed to say I have unreasonably bad parts. I do have violent impulses sometimes, e.g. I could see how I could be a murderer, had I been less stable. I am surprised by those inner reactions, but I have accepted them as kind of OCD thing.
Compared to CBT, IFS is much more scripted — which means AI can do this, with much less variation in quality. Actually I have tried that and loved it. So “most therapists can’t do it right” might not get in a way here
I was reminded somewhat of some paragraphs by a review of Peter Brown's "The Making of Late Antiquity." I haven't read the book, but according to the reviewer's summary, the Roman world of the late Empire saw the "demonic," and religion in general, as at least in part a mental health issue:
> Religious practice under the high empire, even spiritual adventure, was usually a form of therapy. In the third century, the "debate about the holy" became a matter of life and death, of salvation and damnation. The great anxiety of the age, in Brown's telling, was to sort out saints from sorcerers. Just as in public life people sought reliable connections to the center of power, so in spiritual practice people sought out "friends of God," who could be relied on not to exploit the connection to the faithful.
> Brown is keen to emphasize that the empire of the third century was not seized by superstitious hysteria. Quite the opposite: people took a prosaic stance toward the supernatural as just another of life's problems. Given the premises of the time, their behavior was perfectly rational. As in the second century, people in the later empire believed they encountered the supernatural daily. The difference was that they tried to limit their contact with it.
> The effect was like when a neighborhood experiences a long-term increase in crime, so that eventually every window has bars and every door has multiple locks. Just as people viewed contact with public life with increased trepidation, so they sought to prevent disruptive influences from the other world impinging on this one. Brown points out that there was a somewhat non-judgmental attitude toward demons, even among Christians. The problem with demons was not that they were evil, but that they were incomplete. Demons tried to possess human beings in order to become whole. To be free of them was not so much virtue as hygiene.
I see that one commenter already brought up the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Chöd, aka "Feeding your demons," developed by the Tibetan yogini Machig Labdrön. It has a lot of similarities with IFS that I think are worth commenting on.
Years ago, I picked up the book "Feed Your Demons" by Lama Tsultrim Allione, a sort of DYI guide to a Westernized version of Chöd. I ended up doing the practice (I'll refer to it as FYD henceforth to distinguish it from authentic Chöd) multiple times, and generally found it very useful and helpful.
Disclaimer! n = 1, I'm not saying this will help others the way it helped me, also I have no diagnosed mental illnesses and have never suffered serious trauma, I used FYD to help me with things like "I'm really sad because the guy I am in lust with chose to date someone else" and "I'm super stressed about lab work."
Anyhow, how does FYD actually work? First of all, it is completely agnostic as to the nature of the "demons." Are they something external to you, or projections of your own mind? A true Buddhist would say that this question is meaningless, based on the illusion of separateness, because in reality, nothing has an independent, separate existence. But for the purpose of the practice, I guess it doesn't really matter how you think of the "demons." You just pick whatever you want to work with - look at your life and ask yourself, "What is making me unhappy/afraid/preventing me from living a good life and having meaningful relationships with people?" Then work with that.
Scott says: "I tried most of their tricks for initiating this sort of trance and meeting Sabby or whoever. I got nothing. I notice most of the patients with great results are severely traumatized borderlines"
This is not how FYD works. You don't enter a "trance." Your feelings (of stress, fear, envy, anger, whatever) are real, and you use your *imagination* to make those feelings appear like a sentient being that is separate from you - a snake, a monster, whatever. Remember when, in the original Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi tried to teach Daniel-san to trim a bonsai tree? Mr. Miyagi: "Picture the tree in your mind. Now, make like picture." Daniel-san: "How do I know if my picture is the right one?" Mr. Miyagi: "If comes from inside, always the right one." That's how it is with the demons: Ask yourself, "If my fear were to take on corporeal form, what would it look like?" And then you quietly wait for a picture to form in your mind. Whatever picture forms is the right one. (I guess FYD isn't for people with aphantasia, sorry guys!)
Once you have the snake/monster/whatever sitting in front of you, you ask it: "What do you want? What do you need? How will you feel if you get what you need?"
Then you enter the monster's mindset and reply to the three questions *from the monster's perspective*. This part is freaky! Pay attention especially to the answer to the last question; notice that it's a FEELING (I will feel powerful, peaceful, joyful, etc.)
Then - this is the freakiest part of all - you imagine your consciousness leaving your body and watching the scene from above. Now, *dissolve your body* into the essence of whatever feeling was the answer to question 3. So, say your body dissolves into a golden liquid that is "the essence of joy."
And feed the essence to the demon.
Key point, most important part: feed the demon until it is fully satisfied. You cannot rush this! If you are stingy, the whole practice won't work. You must choose to give abundantly, generously. "Here, demon, are you sure you're satisfied? If not, I've got more! Here's more!"
After a while of doing this, you will notice the demon start to change. Either it will dissolve, or, what is even more inspiring, it will transform into something beautiful and good. Again, this is not a trance or hallucination; this is your imagination, but the imagined process will feel real *emotionally* if that makes any sense.
Have you read "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis? One of the shadows was carrying an ugly red lizard on his shoulder, representing lust. An angel told the shadow, "The only way to enter the Land beyond the mountains is to let me kill the lizard." The shadow was terrified, but in the end he agreed. The angel crushed the lizard and threw it away, but the lizard didn't die; it transformed into a magnificent white horse! The liberated spirit (no longer a shadow) mounted the horse and they rode off together into the mountains. This lizard-to-horse transformation is the closest analogy I've found in the literature to what happens in my imagination during FYD.
Once the demon is gone or transformed, imagine your body reforming (the body that you fed to the demon) and your consciousness reentering your body, and then just sit for a few minutes in silence and peace. Repeat as often as needed.
Again, if you have actual diagnosed mental illnesses or conditions, I would NOT recommend doing any of this without consulting an expert first, I got away with it because I'm just a regular middle-class white woman suffering from some typical middle-class white woman neuroses and things, but, again, emphasizing n = 1, this practice really worked for me.
And this deals with heartache or stress? Is it purely an „I feel peaceful and can deal with lab work“ placating or do you also barter/negotiate with the demon? „I will power through lab work, but next weekend I will go hiking“
Good question, I should say that I haven’t done this in years -got out of the habit - but back when I used to do it, the “demon” in its visible form was something I would imagine for the purpose of the FYD exercises, and outside of those exercises I would not talk to or bargain with it. And yeah, I had be reasonable about it, it’s not like I could say “ yeah, I’ll completely mess up my work /life balance and then just do FYD, it’ll be fine.”
Also, I tended to wait until my negative emotions were really strong before doing FYD, probably would have had even better results if I did more regular maintenance FYD.
Thanks for sharing!
I'm reminded of the weight-loss advice: "The best diet is the one that you, personally, will actually do. Find a diet that you can follow scrupulously, with cheating or relapsing or abandoning, and whatever dumb thing it says to do will probably work.'
Neural networks change their function by running a lot of data through them while carefully controlling reward and punishment in order to re-train them.
What type of data you are running through them - whether that's CBT processes, free association, metaphors about Parts or Demons, or etc. - may not be very relevant to the efficacy of the process.
What matters is that the patient actually does the process, takes it seriously and runs it carefully, spends many many hours on it consistently, implements it in their day-to-day activities, etc. As long as you're actively making an effort to explicitly change stuff about the network by running attention through it and aiming it towards the desired state, the metaphor you're using doesn't really matter.
So, perhaps the best therapy for a given patient is the one that they'll actually do. And people have wildly different preferences and personalities that make some approaches motivating and self-reinforcing, and makes other approaches boring or unpleasant, and a therapist needs to figure that out for each patient.
Yea, I mean, I really think the confusion between all these frameworks for experience is that the concept of "identity" is fundamentally confused. We are not one "person" OR "many people" OR "zero people". In actuality, the entire concept of "Self" is a confused notion. (See similar arguments about Free Will) Several frames agree on this:
- Buddhism. This is the "anatta", the first mark of existence. Anatta is not translated as "no self". It is translated as "non-self". This is what it points to, that yes it _feels_ like we have one or many selves depending on who we are and our cultural influences. It is important sometimes to engage with this reality. But in fact "self" is just some weird confused self-referential notion that's tripping us up all the time. It's a strange loop that's hurting us, and we can drop it. If you meditate enough, you'll notice. And then all your parts (including the main one) will kinda unwind, you'll go through some trippy stuff on the way, and you'll eventually reach an equilibrium of being really really well-adjusted. (aka, "enlightened")
- Neuroscience: Human cortex is extraordinarily undifferentiated at the molecular level. (versus other animals) It's kinda just a big pancake of cortical microcolumns copy-pasted everywhere. Everyone has been looking for a locus of "self" or a "seat of consciousness", and hasn't really found it. There's the PFC, which sorta directs the attention, but it only does it contingent on the previous input. There's the language parts (those are what turns up in the Default Mode "Network" - I'm a neuroscientist and have beef with that interpretation). Christof Koch thinks it's something about theta waves, but those are just sort of thing that synchronizes everything, they're a process not a part.
- Generic Mysticism: Dissolve the ego, we are all one, all that jazz.
- Anthropology: As Sapiens famously theorizes, the thing that makes homo sapiens special is that we hive mind better than the other human species.
So, sometimes it feels like you have many selves, and sometimes it feels like you have one, and sometimes people even feel like they are god, but really none of these is true. It (not you, it) is just a big pancake of neurons building associations and trying to wire efficiently, same as everyone else's. As for the frameworks on the way--great, whatever works for you. Just remember that none of it is true. Not demons, not parts, not the western atomic individual mind.
"But in fact "self" is just some weird confused self-referential notion that's tripping us up all the time. It's a strange loop that's hurting us, and we can drop it."
If the "self" is just an illusion, then who are the "us" who are tripped up by it; who are the "we" who can drop it?
I'm sorry, I've read a fair bit about Buddhism and I value and respect it for having helped me a lot (see my post on Feeding Your Demons below) and for teaching compassion. But the "self is an illusion" statement has always struck me as self-(heh) defeating. If there is no self, then who is writing these words? People aren't just some kind of undifferentiated mass, individuals clearly have their own personalities and characters and values, I can very clearly tell the difference between "this is my beloved husband" and "this is my colleague in the department who is super smart but also a bit of a d-bag, I try to avoid him when I can."
Not intended to self-promote, but I just don't want to write this up again:
https://thegnskald.substack.com/p/the-entirety-of-self
What struck me, reading this, was that as well as or instead of some people having “some perverse part of them that they can’t identify with in any way, at all, something with no redeeming value”, it may be that they simply need to occupy the role of a hero defeating an evil entity, and this is what allows them to feel ‘clean’ and ‘whole’? One of the ways our brains work is by assimilating story structures, and we are told stories from a very young age about good conquering evil, and a kit purging and purity…
I wonder what the correlation between Inner Demons (TM) and upbringing In Evangelical Christianity of the sort that very much believes in demons. It’s a widespread belief!
Also, I wonder if you can switch to the Demonology Benefit when your patient’s Mental Health Benefit is exhausted.
I have a sketch of a theory of mind in which all of this demon stuff reads as completely credible. Long post:
Starting here:
> that Bessel van der Kock seemed to think that everything was great for trauma as long as it’s not an evidence-based therapy performed by real doctors... What if doing something exotic and special is an important ingredient?
1. It's much easier to let something affect you if you believe it's true and important, and everyone around you believes it. This applies to emotions, too—consider e.g. the "oceanic feeling" which Freud considers at the opening of "Civilization and its Discontents", which is cited by some friend of his as evidence for religion. A "feeling", to a fully-secularized person, is obviously just part of that person, but we do not naturally take our own feelings seriously—they seem to be coming from outside of us, and have some relationship to the universe as a whole. An adolescent crush doesn't feel like "I desire this person"—it feels like something happening *to you*, like Fate itself. It's much easier to take it seriously when you don't doubt this!
2. There are (in all likelihood) various "real subjective phenomena" corresponding to spiritual concepts like: the "oceanic feeling" of oneness, God, demons, angels, and perhaps also chakras, reincarnation, etc. A particularly important one is God, of course, and one *sense* of the word God is just "Good", and refers to the truest expression of one's own conscience intention, undistorted by any vanity or fear.
I've been reading St Augustine' Confessions, which to me mostly reads as aiming to dispel the vanities and fears that occlude him from acting on his own conscience. Often the occlusion takes the form of "thinking he's supposed to do something because people approve of him for wanting it", then finding that he feels no more whole after receiving their approval, and reflecting on the futility of the whole thing—why was he not whole in the first place? What *should* he do then? The deepest conscience, in this model, doesn't want approval, it wants something else—largely, to work out spiritual and philosophical problems so it can be seen and comprehended directly. The end result of the process is to reach a state of full "responsibility for one's own actions"—i.e. admitting his sins, no longer believing things he does to have "happened to him". It all sounds like trauma therapy to me.
3. A major function of social/religious institutions is to bestow credibility upon the deeper and subtle emotions, and to throw shade on the shallow, vain, and harmful ones. A great way to help people trust their deepest consciences is to validate the experience of that feeling as being "outside oneself" as an external God, and to constantly argue from every possible angle that that God literally exists as incontrovertible metaphysical truth, and is everything it "feels like". If you're sufficiently convinced that you do not have some ready sarcastic dismissal of your internally constructed sense of "God", you can't help but think in terms of it—which can be good, i.e. not harmful, if that received construct points to something good!
4. A basic function of the mind is to learn to not hurt yourself or get in trouble. When you do one of these things, and you don't immediately learn from the error, a new "Part" is minted to figure it out later. The more the pain reoccurs the more powerful the Part grows—so if a kid spends their entire youth feeling like there's something wrong with them because nobody likes them, they might come up with a huge network of thoughts and memories all associated with the problem. They might find their mind teeming with instances where they embarrassed themselves, all clamoring to be "learned from". This Part's functions are: to process the feared problem in the background, and to circulate it into consciousness periodically (maybe *constantly*), and to pattern-match new stimuli against the fear and override behavior to keep getting hurt again via a rapid direct fear respond until a deeper "lesson" can be assimilated. The Part can eventually go away if you come to feel safe eventually, e.g. if you're around grownups long enough that people stop teasing you when you expect them to, or if you process it e.g. in IFS and come to see how it's maladaptive, or, you work out the proper deeper "moral lesson" which the shame was trying to teach you, e.g.: "oh, I don't need people to like me, I can just like them first."
A major failure mode is when the fear response of one Part produces the exact behavior which another Part is afraid of, because then it's extremely hard to stop doing the thing which hurts you. The mind kinds of shuts down at this point and goes into a depression/spiritual crisis/dark night of the soul to solve the problem. (Note: medication for this shutdown would be an error, bc it fails to untangle the fears that are causing the problem!) Augustine's situation looks like this: he's doing things from one Part, he doesn't really know why and then another Part of him is ashamed of it. He has to untangle these things in order to recover a "free" will that no longer hurts itself by habit.
5. But people can also receive "Parts" directly from others. Some of these I think of as like "Greek Gods", which seem to be "Fourier modes" of the collective consciousness—e.g. everyone picks up the "voice of Athena" to some degree by mirror-neuroning it from the people around them. That's a good-aligned one, but another example is "Rape Culture", understood as a package of beliefs and behaviors which are tempting to young men who are trying to reconcile their own (oceanic) sexuality with deep insecurity. People have "holes" in their mental boundary around their own fears. For those young guys it's fears around sex and masculinity. Many people have "holes" around their own intelligence and will defer to a confident person. Cult leaders and religions enter through holes in, say, spiritual meaning. Augustine's shame around his vanity and sexuality opens up to moral instruction and eventually to Catholicism. Some of the things that enter can be good-aligned, some are evil and can be called "demons". All, probably, turn evil if given too much power ("idols"?)—but maybe the point of Augustine's "God" is that it, uniquely, being the conscience of "Good" itself, has no such failure mode.
6. Finally the IFS demons I think can be understood as the same kind of social construct, but which is forced on a person despite no intentional "opening" through an insecurity. Traumatic events just happen to you, you cannot prevent them, and the mind does *something* in turn to make sense of it. It can speak because the language-brain can convert any thought into *some* kind of words, but the "voice" of the demon isn't real, it's just the mind interpreting the underlying feelings in some plausible way—fear, abandonment, rage, and the like. (Often trauma-inducing crimes are the re-expressions of someone else's trauma, so they too can be seen as "particles" in the collective conscioussness! A field theory of minds..?)
The only thing to do with the demon is to cut it loose, because it was forceably implanted in the first place. But this is perhaps more easily done a) with grace, forgiveness, acceptance, etc, and b) if you find the aesthetic context of the therapy to be credible enough that your normal defense mechanism around "what are willing to let it in" goes down, per point 1. (This is what good art is for!)
One last corollary: I would expect that the most effective way to intervene to drive out a "demon" is not to doing something "exotic and special", but to have a lot of people involved in the process as a kind of ritual. Here I think of a) a documentary on men's therapy in prisons called "The Work", where you can *watch* this happen b) the "Banality of Evil" phenomena where if everyone is aligned with the evil, it doesn't even feel evil, and c) the power of mass movements to rewrite people. (Far left, far right, etc etc.)
There it is. Taken seriously, none of this book review is surprising to me, so maybe it will be useful to someone else.
> If you're sufficiently that you do not have
Sufficiently what? You seem to have left out a word there.
Thanks, edited. I do that a lot.
This is a really interesting theory. Thanks for sharing.
I had a distressing period of my life, lasting 23 days, that I have never found a more fitting description for than "I had a demon inside me". I was not seeing a therapist of any kind during this period. I was raised Baptist in a house with Christian books about demon possession, so of course I would not have found that phrase without suggestions from upbringing. I was working as an investment banker at the time, and work stress was pressing me so hard that my marriage was suffering. I had never been diagnosed with any mental illness. The onset was a stormy night in bed when I felt some kind of presence enter my body. It's entrance was visceral and unpleasant. My symptoms were that from that night on I experienced a new, strongly compelling voice in my head that hadn't been there before telling me to say and do things, none of which were illegal or even apparently dangerous, but which did feel alien and out of character for me. I found the presence of this voice so unpleasant that on weekdays I would leave my office and walk to a Catholic chapel across the street and pray privately every day for this thing to get out of my head. These steps did not help that I can tell. I am not Catholic and did not talk about this affliction to any clergy. On the twenty-third day, I was sitting in an airport scrolling Wikipedia, and I discovered a citation to a verse in the Book of James saying that one could test for "unclean spirits" by asking them if they believed Jesus was the Son of God. I tried this on myself. The voice in my head waffled and at first would not commit to an answer. I pressed it further. The voice eventually admitted that it did not believe Jesus was this Son of God. I said that, given this answer, it could not stay inside me and I commanded it to leave. I was surprised that it did leave then and there, leaving behind a peaceful mental calm. I was very relieved with the feeling of freedom I felt from this unpleasant psychic hanger-on. In the weeks and months that followed, I quit my stressful job and eventually found a better paying one in a different industry. My marriage also began slowly to improve after this.
> I discovered a citation to a verse in the Book of James saying that one could test for "unclean spirits" by asking them if they believed Jesus was the Son of God.
I'm curious, what verse is that? I just had a look through James, and the most relevant thing I could find leans in the opposite direction. James 2:19 points out that "the devils" believe in God just as strongly as Christians do; he uses this as evidence against the notion that simple belief in God alone ("faith without works") is sufficient for justification.
It's been many years; looks like it was actually a passage from I John that helped me, not from James. It was 1 John 4:1-3.
Thanks!
According to Monsignor Rossetti's book, Diary of an Exorcist, you did exactly what you were supposed to do. You recognized something was wrong of an evil nature, prayed about it, tested it the "right" way, discovered it was bad and commanded it to leave you. He writes that we have authority to command evil spirits to leave our own bodies, or that of our spouse/minor children. (However, he warns that we should not do this with anyone else.) It sounds like your prayers were answered.
Although incidental to the main point of this piece, Scott Peck is an interesting case whose interestingness is not fully captured in the blurb.
It's been about 20 years since I read People of the Lie, but my recollection is that it was a more general book about evil, initially focused on conventional psychological explanations. Then, in one of the more jarring twists I've encountered in a non-fiction book, he discusses his encounters with demonic possession. IIRC, he attributes his introduction to the possible reality of demonic possession to Malachi Martin, a Jesuit priest of an ambiguous level of frockedness, who wrote Hostage to the Devil, a purportedly non fiction account of five possessions and exorcisms. It's an entertaining read, though it did not radiate a deep commitment to the unvarnished truth. Martin himself is highly controversial and in my opinion gives the impression of the variety of charismatic grifter who writes conspiracy theory histories about the Holy Grail being created by ancient aliens.
Peck himself does appear to be sincere in his writing, so I wondered about the degree to which he was influenced charismatic individual, for whom he apparently felt significant affection and admiration, who primed him to find demonic possession in his future endeavors.
I had the same reaction to that book, which came right after "The Road Less Traveled," a marvel of grounded psychiatric explanations for so much of how life works. Though I agreed with his take on how human evil gets perpetuated in so many ways, the demon possession turn was jarring. I've wondered about it ever since, so the fact that some other seemingly serious psychiatrists and therapists are now endorsing that idea is causing me to reevaluate my disregard for his weird turn.
indeed, Psychotherapy and psychodynamic thought is influenced by exorcism. Henri Ellenberger makes a pretty good case out of this in his book The Discovety of The Unconscious. It was during the Enlightenment period in Europe when a secular approach to psychogenic illness took place.
In the late 18th century Franz Mesmer went to France (the epicenter of science and philosophy at the time) he convinced a good deal of people that he could cure with magnets and touchwith his theory of animal magnetism and his techniques of artificial somnabism (hypnosis). His cures were much more gentle than the typical therapies of electrocution, starvation, experimental brain surgery, etc. This is probably why it was widely accepted.
Ellenberger chalks it up to rapport, the placebo effect, and psychic epidemics. Edward F Kelly's Irreducible Mind points to the fact that historically there were tons of weird psychic epidemicsike the Dancing Manias of Europe in the late Middle Ages source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/63232/63232-h/63232-h.htm). These were often cured by preists performing exorcisms, which were probably produced by placebo, because the preists used fabricated stories of old Christian martyrs like St. John and St. Vitus to produce their cures.
Either way, I enjoy your take that these are conceptual bins in which to approach therapy. The psychodynamic thinkers like Adler, Janet, Freud, and Jung tried to tackle this problem in a "scientific" way, but it seems like the experiential part of the psyche is immaterial and can't be validated by science. Either way, the fact remains that for thousands of years (like Jaynes' theory) our psychic life can seem foreign to the post-enlightenment Western view of a unified psyche.
So, several years ago, I was in a bit of a funk for a few weeks. Nothing major, just borne of an unpleasant realization and some career stuff. One night, I found myself at an area tech meetup, and the talk was honestly both pretty dry and really, really long.
So I decided to mentally check out a bit. I envisioned my current funk as a physical object, just an inert thing, to which I imagined a really cool fight sequence where some hero guy was throwing it around and smashing it into the ground from orbit. I think it ended with the object being buried underneath layers of rocks or something.
For some reason, the funk just left after that night, and I was back to normal. I guess the drawn-out epic battle made my brain think "huh, guess that's been Addressed and Taken Care Of, so I can stop worrying about it." I recommend it if you find yourself with a couple hours to kill, props if you make the battle more epic than realistic.
I took a half a hit of LSD once to celebrate my birthday with a few friends. I had been enduring a low-grade depression for several months, so was at best expecting a brief diversion, but the experience shifted something enough that the funk completely lifted. How much of our mind patterns are unfortunate loops just needing an elastic perspective shift?
Scott has documented this thing before - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/ is one of his posts on the matter. It definitely seems plausible!
<mild snark>
>Investigate to make sure there are no remaining sub-demons or super-demons. Many demons, once they get into a person, will summon sub-demons to tighten their hold.
This is the step where Susan Calvin plugs her patient into a debugger with good stack trace display and exploration capabilities.
</mild snark>
I guy I used to work with had a sign at his desk: "Life would be SO much easier if we only had the source code."
Many Thanks! Yup - _provided_ that it was well commented...
This was absolutely crazy and so cool. I want to go into a trance and find out that the reason I get sad or angry is a demon. Also, if demons drive your sex drive higher, you let in a demon occasionally on weekends, exorcise it Sunday evening. What’s the problem?
Are you *seriously* asking "what could possibly go wrong?" here?
Demonic safetyists have all these theoretical concerns when the benefits of possession are obvious and based in empirics
What benefits, exactly? The one you cite — increased sexual promiscuity — is a well-known problematic behavior even outside the context of religious morality. It carries with it so many different (and non-mutually-exclusive) ways to screw up your life that, like Charles Babbage, "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a [notion]."
It’s not even necessarily promiscuity! Imagine a married couple with a dead bedroom. They both agree to be demonically possessed as a temporary measure to bring spontaneity into their marriage. I think it would go well
I feel if you want to induce altered mental states in order to spice up your sex life, erotic hypnosis would be a better choice than demonic possession. Or at least easier to explain to your partner.
This. Not to mention the other obvious downsides.
1. Side effects. Why should you expect that enhancing your sex life is the *only* thing the demon does? (As @drosophilist mentioned in a nearby comment, there's a long tradition of literature warning against making deals with devils, for exactly this reason. They always end up screwing you over by doing things you didn't anticipate or want.)
2. You're assuming that they wouldn't wise up after it happens a few times. While reason does not necessarily dictate that an acceptance of the existence of demons implies an acceptance of the whole of Christian doctrine, it does at the very least bring you to the point where Matthew 12:43-45 is worth taking seriously.
Well yeah, that’s why you’d be safe with an IFS exorcist nearby to pull the demon out of you. You wouldn’t just import a demon into your soul.
Do demons durably learn things? I doubt they do, given that they still do the exact same stuff they’ve been doing for thousands of years. They’re evil, but seem to be stupid as well
Why? I think a demon is probably just better at sex than a human and would give better advice than hypnotizing yourself
If demons are not real, then it makes no difference whether you hypnotize yourself to go into sex mode or allow a sex demon to possess you, they're both just your brain fiddling with itself.
If demons are actually real, then getting possessed is significantly more dangerous than doing psychological trickery on yourself.
But it really isn’t that dangerous. Like all the danger comes from not knowing you’re being possessed by a demon and having that screw up your life. If you know you have been possessed, then you simply tell it to go towards the light when you’re done with it and it does! Easy.
At this point, I recommend _Lent_ by Jo Walton, a fantasy/historical novel about Savonarola. Let's just say there are demons and then there are demons.
Heh.
>Demonic safetyists have all these theoretical concerns
Groan :-) Cute!
So who would be the analog to Yudkowsky? :-)
Hmm... Can Maxwell's demon comply with Asimov's three laws, while breaching thermodynamic's second law? :-)
People really will sell their souls to Satan for a corn chip.
It’s not selling your soul if you get it right back. This is more like loaning your soul. Given people’s testimonies after exorcism, it seems like they are perfectly fine afterwards right? There’s no lasting harm to demonic possession once the demon is gone
"There’s no lasting harm to demonic possession once the demon is gone"
Tell me you've never read a single folk tale or story about "a person makes a deal with the Devil, it's all upside/no downside, how bad could it be" without telling me you've never read...
It is selling your soul. If you are deliberately invoking demonic possession to obtain advantages of some type (e.g. your examples of HAWT SMEXY TIMES) and trying to pull a switch by inviting in/expelling/inviting back in, do this over and over - you are making a bargain with the Devil (to be corny about it).
(1) You are deliberately and with knowledge and consent opening up yourself to demonic possession and inviting them in to perform acts and services for you
(2) This is not a once-off thing, you intend for this to be an ongoing event
(3) Doesn't matter if you 'exorcise' the demon(s) afterwards, you intend to invite them back in later
All of this constitutes a contract, and one you're paying for with your soul. Once that's done, there's no 'borrowing' or getting it back. Demonic possession is not about loaning out your soul. The price for the services you want is the soul, and think of it more like a "lifetime loan" - in the end, you have to sell the house to pay back the loan you took out:
https://dowlingfinancial.ie/news/explainer-what-is-a-lifetime-loan-and-how-do-they-work/
Even if we dismiss the religious notion of demons and say that these are just energies or archetypes or something, you are still doing the equivalent of handing over your property to squatters. By what authority do the IFS therapists carry out exorcisms? If the possessing entity is, for example, a deceased human, they may decide they prefer to be re-embodied once more and don't want to "move into the light" (see the categories of demons under IFS - "Some of them are the spirits of the unquiet dead ... Others have always been demons, as long as they remember. Still others are “legacy burdens”, who were passed down from the patient’s parents or ancestors").
Traditional exorcism practices depend on an external authority, be it gods, God, spiritual forces or the rules of magic, to force out the demons who don't want to leave. But the IFS system has no authority other than that of the therapist, and a possessing entity who won't agree to be cast out by the therapist won't be easily dislodged. If the power to drive it out rests ultimately with you ("If it still refuses, ask your patient to visualize casting the demon out of themselves and engulfing/dissolving it in light"), you have made that *way* more difficult by inviting them in and voluntarily giving them control of your mind and body. You've handed over the keys of your house and now they can lock you out.
Anyway, what makes you think demonic sex would be so great? It's the demon having it in your body, you may have little to no remembrance of the sex or experience of the pleasure. That's the kind of cheating such bargains involve.
I know this is treating the light-hearted suggestion you made much more seriously than the original warranted, but the principle remains: 'what harm can come from me mucking around with my brain chemistry and mental states?' Quite a lot, actually.
Oh shoot you’re right. Maybe I should go towards the light…
> Anyway, what makes you think demonic sex would be so great?
Yeah, it might be great for the *demon*, but what if the demon has very different kinks than you do?
There was this guy down at the crossroads I met when I was a kid, and he told me how I could get really good with these new computers...
Did he promise you a heat sink made of gold?
Hmm... :-)
Actually, diamond would be better, though, weirdly, boron arsenide seems to be better still... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thermal_conductivities
Huh, I didn't realize that gold (~315) was that much worse than silver (406). Maybe it gets some advantages by being so ductile and thus allowing for thin radiator vanes?
Many Thanks!
>Maybe it gets some advantages by being so ductile and thus allowing for thin radiator vanes?
A metallic properties consolation prize? :-)
( I haven't the foggiest idea how hard it is to fashion boron arsenide into a heat sink. These days we can grow CVD diamond films, so that probably works as e.g. a connection to a cold plate... )
Really, I was just thinking about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh7BZf7D5Bw
Many Thanks! A classic!
Regarding Christian missionaries in the East and being popular for exorcisms: this is still the case.
My brother works in global missions and recounted to me a missionary conference he attended a few years ago in India. One of the speakers was a very successful Indian church planter (a missionary who specializes in traveling from place to place, starting a new local church, gathering enough of a congregation to make it self sustaining and then moving on to repeat the process). This missionary had planted hundreds of churches in India and he always used the same method: he would come to a village and ask around to see if anyone knew anybody in the village who was possessed by evil spirits. There was almost always someone, and he’d go to them and exorcise the demon. The possession victim and their family was usually so amazed at this missionaries power to cast out spirits that they’d convert to Christianity and become the first members of his new church plant. Their neighbors and friends would often also be impressed enough to give the whole Christian thing a try.
This matched early Christian accounts like the book of Acts where Paul and others regularly gain converts by casting out demons. It’s real proof of spiritual power, so to speak: I’d he can get rid of an evil spirit that the local priests and shamans or whatever can’t then there must be something to this Jesus guy.
Reading this review reminds me that there seem to be a lot of similarities between the problems of therapists and those of singing teachers. This may seem off-the-wall, but bear with me.
If you are trying to learn a musical instrument, your teacher can say things like 'your elbow needs to be higher' or 'press with your fingers and not your arm', and both you and the teacher will have a shared understanding of what this means. This is because you both share objective sensory evidence of what is going on (you can both see your arm and fingers). By contrast, we had up until recently very limited understanding of how vocal production actually worked. This only started to change in the 70's, when scientists started to investigate singing of volunteers by means of a laryngoscope, and more recently with MRI machines. But even today the teacher and pupil can't see what's going on in real time, and even if the teacher can say 'you need to raise your cricoid cartilage', the pupil is unlikely to be able to map this description to their own subjective experience unless they have first been trained on where the cricoid cartilage is, what what it feels like to raise it, etc.
Of course, people were trying to teach singing for centuries before this. So they had to rely in arbitrary invented or inherited vocabulary mapping the subjective experience of singing, and on black-box results, to inform their attempts. So we have things like 'head voice' and 'vocal support' which, although they match physical subjective sensations, with hindsight turn out to be based on erroneous theories of what is happening (the voice is always produced in the larynx, not sometimes in the head or chest). Moreover, voice teachers turn out to be very attached to these descriptions, assigning them an objective reality, even though they may not necessarily correspond to the subjective sensations of their pupil. A critical issue is that even if the pupil would (in theory) experience the same sensation, the pupil cannot identify what a term is supposed to mean until they experience it - but the route to experiencing it is exactly what needs to be taught. Under these circumstances learning singing was quite hit-and-miss, and it was assumed that some people simply had more aptitute for it than others - even though failure was likely due to failure to communicate rather than an inherent deficiency in the pupil.
Ok so how is this similar to therapy? Just that therapists have the same problem, on steroids. The topic they need to discuss with their patients, mental states, operations, and actions, also has no direct objective, external sensory evidence. A therapist needs to guide their patient to perform mental actions which they may never before have experienced. Schools of therapy also develop terminology based on the subjective experiences of the founders, which they are very attached to, which might not correspond well to the subjective experience of patients.
I think the lesson from this is that therapists should have more epistemic humility, and need to concentrate more on finding ways to help the patient conduct mental exploration without insisting on the objective reality of the terminology that they use to do so. In CBT, for example, at least some practitioners seem to insist that everything is due to verbal thoughts, and every problem can be solved by verbal thoughts; whereas it seems quite likely to me that verbal thoughts merely indicate the way to non-verbal mental actions, and merely verbalising a phrase is like turning a crank that's not attached to anything if it doesn't lead the patient to grasp and be able to take the corresponding mental action. IFS does seem like a productive way to get patients to creatively think about their own mentality, but the belief in the objective reality of demons is troubling, and I expect that as the number of practitioners scale up, it will be frozen into a set of patterns to be identified rather than therapists taking away the idea that it's a tool to understand the patient on their own terms.
An incredibly interesting analogy, thanks for sharing it. Wonder if that means the future of therapy is doing therapy inside futuristic MRI machines, to finally provide that baseline background references everyone needs to be able to communicate on the same page.
I'm a long-time therapist with IFS training, have done extensive IFS in my own therapy (among other methods), and use IFS (and other methods) in my work. I've read most of the books in the IFS tradition, though interestingly, not this one.
My experience is that the IFS Institute and Schwartz himself have been very loose about what gets published and by whom under the IFS label, more so than other therapy modalities. There's a bit more wackiness around the edges. Though certainly not any more than we've seen historically -- Gestalt, Jungian, Freudian, etc.
This piece by Scott, while entertaining, gives a distorted view of IFS as it's practiced out there in the world and written about for the most part. Maybe this is the hidden esoteric thread, but from my experience it seems more like an obscure sideshow.
I know a lot of IFS therapists and none of them are doing demon exorcism. None of the ones I know force a frame onto the inner work done by clients as either literally "real" or "metaphor." What is the ontological status of any of the material that has ever come up in any modality that involves guided visualization?
Therapy has long made productive and rich use of metaphor and story-telling in helping a person describe and clarify their experience, emotional or otherwise. Various kinds of guided visualization, contemplative practice, meditation, and trance have been used in therapy forever without even including hypnosis or self-hypnosis.
There's no need to attach names and faces to the "parts" in order to get benefit from working this way. A person's own disposition and tendency guides how imaginative and colorful all that gets.
From the past 15 years of being close to IFS therapists and material, I would seriously counter the idea that "most of the patients with great results are severely traumatized borderlines." I don't know what to make of the fact that that's the impression created by what Scott read. It's certainly not my impression from reading the IFS books I've read.
There is for sure a kind of spiritual thread that runs through how Schwartz increasingly characterizes IFS the past half decade compared with twenty years ago. In that time frame, he's also brought in experience with ketamine and other psychedelics. You don't have to sign up for the spiritual view in order to get benefit from the technique.
Two of the best books (I think) to get a sense of the more grounded center of IFS are "Introduction to Internal Family Systems" and "You Are the One You've Been Waiting For," which addresses IFS in the context of relationships, but in the process gives a decent overview of the whole thing.
I've seen IFS help a whole lot of people, including me. I linked to a post I did on metacognitive therapy here a few weeks back, which is about as dry and rational as therapy gets, even more than CBT, and is showing better outcomes than CBT. So I'm not any kind of IFS adherent. But I think it would be unfortunate if people took away the impression that IFS is mainly doing demon exorcism on severely traumatized borderline people. I'm not sure if this analogy works, but it seems akin to me to describing CBT as brainwashing.
Scott, how confident are you that the "demons" are entirely iatrogenic, as opposed to a feature of a preexisting psychopathology? Relatedly, how unique is this issue to IFS as opposed to a thing psychotherapists should be aware of in general?
There is a book called “feeding your demons“ which is a modernization of work that was apparently done by a Buddhist nun in the 12th or the 13th century. The parallels are quite remarkable.
Yes, I comment on it above. I actually did the practices in the book, it was quite remarkable (for me; I don't have any diagnosed mental illness; I don't know how effective or safe it would be for someone with mental illness or serious trauma).
I have found it helpful as a guiding principle for internal mapping (i.o.w. getting to know myself better.) I have a pretty solid history of childhood trauma, but everyone is different so I hesitate to generalize. If one has some agency about how their mind works I think it’s a good blueprint.
I realize this was a book review, not a survey of IFS as practiced, but my experience as a patient of a therapist who (sometimes) used IFS was incredibly different from this. There were no trances, no "discovery," no confrontational negotiations with parts, and certainly no demons. Good therapists are like this: they don't take theories verbatim -- they learn by trial and error what works for them and their patients, often mellowing and modifying theories like IFS or even CBT.
For IFS specifically, the whole idea, as I understood it, was pretty sound. It aims to temporarily un-blend yourself from distressing emotions by thinking of them as a "part" separate from you. This creates self-distance -- a general technique in psych / emotion regulation to detach from your own situation long enough to look at it a little more reasonably. Then you can sort of sit with this "part" / converse with it and find ways that this "unpleasant" part may have a point - there is something they are doing to look out for your well-being. Maybe they're not doing a good job of it, but they are usually not self-hating sadists trying to take you down from the inside.
Like many therapeutic practices, IFS tells a story that might help some people cope better, reflect better, and live with less distress. The story itself isn't literally true, and it won't work for everyone, but that doesn't mean it should all be thrown out.
"The demons often enter the victim during moments of unbearable trauma. The patient, bent to the breaking point, has a moment of weakness when they will take help from any corner - let in anything that offers temporary relief, no matter how unconvincingly. Mostly these are the situations you’d expect - child abuse and rape - but a surprising number of them say they got in during a childhood surgery. "
Childhood surgeries sound rough! I think if I ever have children I won't subject them to any surgeries in their infancy except ones that are genuinely medically necessary.
> I think if I ever have children I won't subject them to any surgeries in their infancy except ones that are genuinely medically necessary.
As opposed to...?
I mean, isn't that how surgery works in general? Getting cut open is such a bad thing for you, physically, emotionally, and financially, that you just don't do it unless there's no better alternative. (Sure, there's cosmetic surgery, but that's a whole 'nother matter that really doesn't apply to infants.)
I am from a generation that routinely had their tonsils removed. I came perilously close to bleeding to death because I was afraid I would get in trouble for breaking the stitches. Times change..
Everyone's *almost* an atheist, right? There are roughly 4000 religions; people believe in almost invariably 0 or 1, likely never more than... ten?
Everyone's almost asexual, too, then; there's an infinite variety of creatures, objects and concepts even on this very Earth to be sexually attracted to, yet only a very limited slice of this variety tends to hold our attraction.
It's a useful perspective; when Socrates said he knew nothing he was approximately correct: what there is to know is infinite and what he knew was finite, so the ratio was zero. Even so-called believers know very little about their faiths; Christianity, for example, is a *huge* mythology; try googling the appearance of angels sometime, they're not fashion models with wings. Or all the nailed-up Christs; most of them, surprisingly, are not skinny big-nosed brown guys; huh.
..."biblically accurate angels" comes up in social medias so often it's not mostly a point of mockery for triteness at this point, it's nothing particularly new. Then again, neither is "everyone's almost an atheist".
I'm actually not sure what "roughly 4000 religions" means here, counting every ethnic pagan religion as its owns? Counting varities of Christianity? Usually this point is made by saying "there are roughly 4000 gods", which makes a bit more sense, though even there many Christians would indeed believe there are 4000... apparitions that claim to be gods but actually being something else, such as the subject of this post.
Well, thanks for making the effort to mock me anyway. ;-)
"... there are roughly 4,200 religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, or ultimate concerns:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religions_and_spiritual_traditions
> try googling the appearance of angels sometime, they're not fashion models with wings.
Indeed: most angels in the actual Bible are completely indistinguishable from regular human beings.
There's a fairly popular indie game from 2018 that seems directly inspired by IFS:
"The player controls Madeline, a young woman with anxiety and depression who aims to climb Celeste Mountain. During her climb, she encounters several characters, including Part of You (also known as Badeline) a personification of her self-doubt who attempts to stop her from climbing the mountain."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeste_(video_game)
(This is the most successful depression-core indie game that I'm aware of; the dev's main focus was the gameplay, which is really quite good.)
(Spoilers) The story arc revolves around a rejection of the "demon" perspective in favor of . After an epiphany about the past trauma that created Badeline, Madeline convinces Badeline to work with her (unlocking the ability to double-jump).
I was raised religious (we took it seriously), and reading fiction gave me a sense of what it would be like if supernatural things were actually real, and as far as I could tell that wasn't the world we were living in, so I became an atheist.
Stuff like this seems important because--you gotta do empiricism! You don't want to have just _decided_ you live in a particular world, and then force your observations to fit. But I think it still makes sense to, like, keep fictional analogues in mind and see if reality lines up with them or not. [Like, are we living in the Warhammer world where Chaos gods stretch their tendrils into the world thru the minds of the possessed? Are we living in the world of the TV show Evil, where a psychologist falls in with a Catholic possession investigation team and runs afoul of a team of demons working together to cause problems?]
"Step seven: Investigate to make sure there are no remaining sub-demons or super-demons. Many demons, once they get into a person, will summon sub-demons to tighten their hold. You have to get rid of all the demons in a hierarchy, or the patient is still infected and they’ll all eventually come back. Hopefully you talked with the demon and your other Parts enough that you know what to expect here. If not, check whether there are any astral strings still linking the patient to the demon you just exorcised. Don’t worry, you can just ask the patient to count how many astral strings there are, and they’ll always be able to do this."
I want to be sympathetic but all I can think is "Go to church" because this is re-inventing the wheel. I'm curious as to how many of these patients come from a Christian background because this is straight out of the Gospels:
Mark 5:
"8 For he was saying to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” 9 And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” 10 And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country."
Matthew 12:
43 “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. 44 Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. 45 Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.”
OK, but this Falconer guy clearly believes he can do successful exorcism outside of church or any reference to the Christian God. How does that work, then? (You know I'm an atheist, but I'm not mocking you here, I'm sincerely trying to understand you.) Do you think it's:
1. God takes pity on the victim of demonic possession, banishes the demon anyway, even though the exorcism wasn't done properly;
2. The exorcism failed, it just seemed to work, because the demon went into hiding temporarily or something;
3. Demons are real, but it's actually possible for a non-Christian to banish them successfully;
4. Demons aren't real, this is all in the patient's head (not your belief, but I'm including it for the sake of completeness);
5. Something else?
I think option 3 is probably compatible with some reading of the Gospels. Jesus healed the sick via miracles but a physician could do that too; there were non-Christian exorcists running around at the time who might have had some success.
Falconer, and I'm going by the review here and not by his book, seems to be using a general framework derived from Christianity, if recast in the New Age mould. So the idea of the light as fearful to the demons, persuading them that it is in fact benevolent, threatening them with casting out into darkness and finally getting the patient to expel them by having them dissolved by the light is very much a God versus Devil scenario, even if he includes "ghosts of dead humans" and "inherited ancestral burdens" (which works out to curses, I suppose) as demons.
So if we have to bite the bullet about "is Falconer dealing with real genuine demons as defined in Christianity, or is it a mix of superstition, mistaken ideas about mental illness, use of metaphors or symbolism taken too far, or what?" and we admit that *some* of it *may* be genuine real demons - as you ask, where does that leave us?
As an aside, the office of "exorcist" used to be one of the minor orders - that is, even without or before being ordained as a priest, being able to banish demons was something a lay person or cleric could do; the disciples in the gospels were excited about being able to cast out demons:
Luke 10
"17 The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” 18 And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19 Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. 20 Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
Taking point no. 3 above, can non-Christians/non-believers do exorcisms?
From the New Testament, it seems that some certainly tried, but this was risky:
Acts 19:
"13 Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.” 14 Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. 15 But the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” 16 And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded."
So the lesson there seems to be "no, you can't just try it yourself".
On the other hand, for point no. 1, in both the gospels of Mark and Luke, there is this account:
Mark 9
"38 John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” 39 But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. 40 For the one who is not against us is for us. 41 For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward."
Luke 9:
"49 John answered, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.” 50 But Jesus said to him, “Do not stop him, for the one who is not against you is for you.”
So it would seem that the answer there is "yes, if you do it in the right way".
Taking 1 and 3 together, it would seem that non-Christians can banish demons but their motivations must be correct.
And even for Christians, or those following Christ, the same gospels have the story of the possessed boy whom the disciples could not exorcise:
Mark 9:
"14 And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and scribes arguing with them. 15 And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him. 16 And he asked them, “What are you arguing about with them?” 17 And someone from the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. 18 And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” 19 And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” 20 And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. 21 And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. 22 And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” 23 And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” 24 Immediately the father of the child cried out[and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” 25 And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” 26 And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, “He is dead.” 27 But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. 28 And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” 29 And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”
Luke 9:
"37 On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met him. 38 And behold, a man from the crowd cried out, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, for he is my only child. 39 And behold, a spirit seizes him, and he suddenly cries out. It convulses him so that he foams at the mouth, and shatters him, and will hardly leave him. 40 And I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.” 41 Jesus answered, “O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here.” 42 While he was coming, the demon threw him to the ground and convulsed him. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit and healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. 43 And all were astonished at the majesty of God."
These disciples who could not cast out the spirit are probably the same ones in the story of the seventy-two above, who came back delighted and boasting about how they could cast out spirits. Pride goes before a fall!
So (i) faith is important, even if you are not technically a Christian and (ii) there are different degrees of exorcism. As explained here by the USCCB:
https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/sacraments-and-sacramentals/sacramentals-blessings/exorcism
"Are there different kinds of exorcisms?
Exorcisms are divided into two kinds (or forms). Simple or minor forms of exorcism are found in two places: first, for those preparing for Baptism, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) and the Rite of Baptism for Children both call for minor exorcisms; secondly, the appendix of Exorcisms and Related Supplications includes a series of prayers which may be used by the faithful.
The second kind is the solemn or "major exorcism," which is a rite that can only be performed by a bishop or a by priest, with the special and express permission of the local ordinary (cf. Code of Canon Law, can. 1172). This form is directed "at the expulsion of demons or to the liberation [of a person] from demonic possession" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1673)."
Here, according to Wikipedia, are the prayers that can be used by the laity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Exorcisms_and_Certain_Supplications
"Title: Prayers which may be used privately by the faithful in the struggle against the powers of darkness.
Appendix Two contains the following (all in Latin):
Five collect-style prayers to God.
A short litany of invocations of the Holy Trinity.
A long litany of invocations of Jesus.
Short invocations to the Lord with the sign of the Cross.
Invocations of the Blessed Virgin Mary, including the Sub tuum and Memorare.
The well-known shorter Prayer to St Michael.
A short litany of saints."
So non-Christians/Falconer and the therapists may be able to carry out simple exorcisms, depending what form of words they use and their intentions and beliefs.
But, uh, don't quote me on that. If you really need an exorcist, consult your local bishop!
One can always count on you for a thorough and informative review of Scripture/literature! 😊 I look forward to reading your thoughts on the ACX Old Testament review.
*ctrl+F "Sceva"*
Ah, there it is.
You've covered all the main points, thanks for that. I'd like to add an American Protestant point of view too.
"Exorcism" (I don't even like to use the word, which isn't in the Bible as far as I know) is usually fairly simple.
Acts 16 (Paul in Philippi):
"16 It happened that as we were going to the place of prayer, a slave-girl having a spirit of divination met us, who was bringing her masters much profit by fortune-telling. 17 Following after Paul and us, she kept crying out, saying, “These men are bond-servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation.” 18 She continued doing this for many days. But Paul was greatly annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out at that very moment."
Yes, you *can* talk to a demon, find out its name, etc., but there's no particular reason you would have to. They are more powerful than a human but not more powerful than God, Who dwells inside a Christian.
(Why then were the disciples unable to cast out the spirit in Mark 9/Luke 9? Was it a more powerful spirit than the one in Acts 16? We are not told explicitly, so there are many points of view. But Jesus' answer that "this kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer [some mss. add 'and fasting']" gives us a glimpse. What is prayer, at its heart, but an admission that we are utterly dependent on God? Sometimes we need to be reminded that it is not our own power that works for us.)\
As for the question of whether a non-Christian can cast out a demon, I refer to the "house divided" episode, which is in three of the gospels. Jesus casts out a spirit and the Pharisees accuse him of having a demon himself.
Luke 11:
"17 But He knew their thoughts and said to them, “Any kingdom divided against itself is laid waste; and a house divided against itself falls. 18 If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? For you say that I cast out demons by Beelzebul. 19 And if I by Beelzebul cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast them out? So they will be your judges. 20 But if I cast out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you."
Once again it is unclear what Jesus means by "your sons cast them out". Does He mean that they are actually able to do it, or is He mocking them? I am unwilling to stake a theological claim here on whether it's possible or not. The absolute best thing I can say, keeping in mind the sons of Sceva, is don't do it if you don't know what you're getting into. And definitely don't do it if you don't believe demons are real.
"Why then were the disciples unable to cast out the spirit in Mark 9/Luke 9?"
I think part of it may have been that they got cocky and proud about their abilities, forgot that it was all dependent on Christ, and assumed that they could do so simply on their own authority. "This kind only goes out by prayer and fasting" does seem to indicate that it was more powerful/deeper rooted problem, that it would take more than a simple "I command you to come out!"
As to the Jewish exorcists, I am not familiar with Jewish tradition but it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were formal exorcists (the sons of the Pharisees having special training or education or duties in this regard, if the Pharisees were the forerunners of Rabbinic Judaism as per Wikipedia) as well as the usual kind of roving wonder-workers, healers, and preachers that you get for any folk religion. The interesting thing is that the Pharisees were not of the traditional priestly caste, those were the Sadducees. So we sort of have a parallel to "established Catholic Church versus Protestant laity reading the Bible" thing going on, as the Pharisees were very much "go back to the traditions! go back to Moses! drop all this fancy Greek influence!" 😀
So there I think Jesus is challenging the Pharisees: "Your own sect exorcises demons - and you are not the priests of the line of the high priests - so by what authority are you doing it? If you say I gain my powers from demons, isn't that accusing your own? And if they do it by the power and grace of God, why do you say I do not?"
I stumbled across this post which claims to have identified who Sceva might have been, or at least that there are grounds for thinking this was a real group and not a parable or fable:
https://www.patternsofevidence.com/2021/10/15/the-sons-of-scevas-botched-exorcism/
"Josephus reports in War II that Quadratus “…sent up to Caesar, along with two other persons of the highest eminence, the high priests Jonathan and Ananias, Ananus, the son of the latter, and some other Jewish notables, together with the most distinguished of the Samaritans.” Who were these two persons of the highest eminence, and the other notables? They were surely of the Jerusalem aristocracy, and were likely from high priestly families themselves, families other than Jonathan’s. All these people bore responsibility as some of the leading decision-makers in Jerusalem. That’s why they had to stand trial.
The parallel account in Antiquities names only Ananias and Ananus, but also includes “their followers.” So it was this unspecified number of additional Jewish leaders, along with Jonathan, Ananias, and Ananus who stood before Claudius in Rome in the year AD 50 or 51.
It is quite likely that the exonerated party of Jewish leaders returned to Jerusalem through Ephesus. A large Jewish colony existed there. Ephesus was one of the world’s greatest cities, and shipping lanes connected Rome to Ephesus. From Ephesus one could travel to Judea by water or by land.
Luke says there were “traveling-around” (perierchomenōn) Jews who were exorcists. This has often been translated: “itinerant.” Perierchomai is a rare word in the New Testament. Of the four instances, two come from Luke, both in Acts. Besides 19:13 which we are considering now, 28:13 employs the word to describe purposeful travel to Sicily by ship—a far different thing from itinerant wandering about.
We must ask whether perierchomai in 19:13 might have originally reflected the purposeful travel of Sceva’s sons returning to Jerusalem from Rome among that party of Jewish leaders Josephus tells us about. At any rate, the presence of a party of High Priests in Rome is documented by Josephus immediately before Paul’s extraordinary Ephesian ministry which began in AD 52. Remarkably, their return to Jerusalem would most likely have taken them through Ephesus, placing them in that city while Paul was there.
...The names of the actual High Priests are known to us from Josephus’ history, and helpfully presented with their years in office by E. Schürer and J. Jeremias. Four families in Jerusalem constituted the aristocracy from whom all the High Priests came during Herodian and Roman times. They were each powerful and wealthy. One of these was the House of Kamit, or Kamithos. The Talmud relates in multiple places that the House of Kamithos produced seven sons, each of whom at some time served as High Priest."
What's *really* fascinating is the brief Wikipedia description of Jewish exorcism:
"Josephus reports exorcisms performed by administering poisonous root extracts and others by making sacrifices.
In more recent times, Rabbi Yehuda Fetaya (1859–1942) authored the book Minchat Yahuda, which deals extensively with exorcism, his experience with possessed people, and other subjects of Jewish thought. The book is written in Hebrew and was translated into English.
The Jewish exorcism ritual is performed by a rabbi who has mastered Kabbalah. Also present is a minyan (a group of ten adult males), who gather in a circle around the possessed person. The group recites Psalm 91 three times, and then the rabbi blows a shofar.
The shofar is blown in a certain way, with various notes and tones, in effect to "shatter the body" so that the possessing force will be shaken loose. After it has been shaken loose, the rabbi begins to communicate with it and ask it questions such as why it is possessing the body of the possessed. The minyan may pray for it and perform a ceremony for it in order to enable it to feel safe, and so that it can leave the person's body."
That part about persuading the demon or spirit to feel safe and leave the person is very like Falconer's description of how to persuade the demon to move on, by making it feel safe enough to let go and leave:
"Step five: Try to convince the demon to leave of its own volition. Falconer has several tricks for this. You can tell it “You’ve been lied to. You were told that the light will burn you. But actually, the light is loving and accepting and where you belong.” If the demon doesn’t believe you, challenge it to touch the light. When it refuses, mock its cowardice (demons are very proud, and hate to be mocked). Eventually it will give in and touch the light and find that the light feels good. Then tell it “Look inside yourself. You’ll find there’s a spark of this same light. You are potentially good and redeemable, you’re just stuck here out of fear and need to move on. If you move on to the healing realms, everyone there will welcome you and you’ll get all the food you could possibly want and be much happier.” If the demon is still doubtful, tell it to look up towards the healing realms, where it might see the hands of people it trusts reaching out for it. Most demons will grudgingly agree that you’re right and leave voluntarily."
> makes the common alt-psychiatry point that maybe schizophrenia is a shamanic crisis, of the sort that other cultures would resolve by becoming shamans
I wonder if this is related to the point that people want to heal through novel and special therapies. Shaman maybe served a role as weirdos and so they would get special healing power because they were special, and so had a useful place.
" I think of it as more of a triumph: realizing on some level that belief in demons made them real, we eradicated that belief with the same fervor that we displayed when eradicating smallpox, polio, and all the other causative agents for dangerous medical conditions."
There's a wonderful SF story somewhat along these lines by Joanna Russ, called "The Man Who Could Not See Devils". It was in her 1983 Baen collection THE ZANZIBAR CAT*, as well as in a bunch of SF anthologies. Worth tracking down.
*Confusingly, she has another collection of the same title published by Arkham House with a somewhat different table of contents and it omits this story.
This is one of those reviews which I’m eager to share with a couple friends interested in IFS. But I can’t be sure if they’ll take it as an attack or a validation.
Also, I guess it might be a cognitohazard, especially for people already inclined to use the IFS lens?
Well, I can see that, but their functioning is very different. The exiles suffers, the firefighter protects.
> I would wonder if this might correspond to the occasional anesthesia failures when a patient ends up awake but paralyzed during surgery. This must be one of the most traumatic experiences possible!
Hello Scott, I remember you wrote about this on your old old blog, but only in short remarks. I find this possibility quite horrifying and interesting at the same time. Have you written about it since then?
I am especially interested in questions such as the following:
1) What is the base rate for remembered awareness during general anesthesia? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15333419/ suggests around 0.1%.
2) Should this influence my decisions regarding getting general anesthesia? Many surgeries are necessary, but some more than others. 0.1% chance of terrible torture for an important surgery is in an uncanny valley for me. 0.01% and I would not think twice about it, 10% and I would only do very important surgeries, I think. If surgery became more common for mundane ailments, this question would rise in importance.
3) What is the pharmacology of anesthetics? How were they discovered and are new ones still getting developed? Is reducing the rate of awareness a goal of current development?
4) Do some anethetics have a lower incidence of awareness than others? Can I influence which anesthetic my doctor uses? Is this problem known among doctors and taken seriously or will they think I am crazy?
5) Can we learn something about conciousness and/or memory from anesthetics and amnestics? Like, if all anesthetics worked by encapsulating the pineal gland, we would go "Yes, that is the principal seat of the soul, next problem please". Since that did not happen, this approach must fail. How does it fail and is there hope still?
See also the comments under https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzj6WkudtrXQFqL8e/inverse-p-zombies-the-other-direction-in-the-hard-problem-of for some discussion and scary case reports by gwern.
You might have noticed me anthropomorphizing my PTSD, as an attempt to avoid integrating it into the rest of my personality. The general experience is what I imagine demonic possession would feel like. (BTW, thanks, I'll put an exorcism on the list of solutions to try. Seriously.) And except that the impression I get of the thing is that it's much more like the Greek goddess Nemesis. (I suppose that still fits with a more Christian view of demons: they whisper that they're right and true and just and all that.)
I never hear voices, but then, I don't think in words either, so I wouldn't expect to.
> And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup.
This makes me wonder whether part of the therapy is persuading the patient that this is true. That, of course when they look inwards and ask, all the parts are fundamentally benevolent and good and just need a bit of re-education before they can become productive members of the internal society. It's the belief that we are all fundamentally good and that we will all shine brightly if the dirt is cleared off. It's a nice story that I would like to be true.
> He’s an external spiritual entity that entered the patient.
Ha! So if the person is good, anything not-good is therefore not the person. Sound logic, questionable premise.
> The patient, bent to the breaking point, has a moment of weakness when they will take help from any corner - let in anything that offers temporary relief, no matter how unconvincingly
I do not recall a moment like this, but then, ECT took out a lot of my memories of that time. That might pose a bit of a problem. Maybe it goes all the way back to childhood, I dunno. On the other hand, the ECT involved a lot of general anaesthesia, and I didn't come up with this model beforehand, so...
> is this victim-blaming?
It's awesome mental judo victim-blaming, is what it is! It's all the demon's fault, the actual victim is pure and innocent! (Reminds me of HBO's "True Blood" here.)
> when asked if he believed in this stuff, he said absolutely because it has cured so many people
Aww, an engineer after my own heart. :-)
> If you ask them point-blank whether they’re a demon, they’ll try to stall and dither. But if you really press the question they almost always admit it.
"That's pride fucking with you." Asking narcissists if they're narcissists also seems to have a decent track record.
> Figure out which Parts of the patient want to keep the demon.
Hm, that might be tricky. There is in fact an injustice there, compounded by other injustices, and removing anything which stands against that seems like a defeat. But I know that's fallacious reasoning - arguments as soldiers etc. - so.
> Confirm that the patient isn’t afraid.
Oooh, not good. I do fear what it's capable of, and that feels like a very appropriate fear. But, hm, maybe that's a result of only taking the possession analogy half-seriously. Maybe if I got all the way into it and made a separation in my mind, I'd get one of those "it only has the power you give it" type of insights. But that level of deliberate mental self-manipulation also scares me.
> Then he immediately breaks his own rule and focuses on the metaphysics.
Alas.
There's a discussion in the last open thread about faith and religion. I'll take a wild stab and say that there's a lot of stuff out there that's much easier to make work if you believe that it will work. It's a hack, but it's a hack that's easy to explain and pass on.
> Getting an exorcism seems like the strongest way possible to say “yes, you’re completely right, all of your pain is 100% real, but now you’re allowed to stop having it without it invalidating how traumatized you were”.
My PTSD would like to pedantically point out that mass public executions by torture might possibly be considered a "stronger" way. Not very practical at large scale, though, so most of us will have to settle for exorcisms.
What's your view on Multiple Personality/Dissociatve Identity Disorder, Scott? My understanding is that it's somewhat controversial. Is it a legitimate diagnostic category or is it just an extreme form of depersonalization or emotional lability or whatever? Have you ever personally seen it? What does it actually look like?
Surely if you have dozens of highly intelligent, scientific minded people interacting with demons on a fairly regular basis, even "weak" ones that can't levitate or breathe fire, it should be pretty simple to prove their existence somehow, right?
Would spending your sessions asking the demon to predict the results of a dice roll or recall some verifiable detail about the last person they possessed instead of trying to exorcise it be unethical?
Forget "unethical;" seems to me it would be pointless. If you're dealing with a thinking being, it's not necessarily going to be willing to do tricks on command like a trained dog.
The whole theory seems predicated on the ability to convince a demon to do what you want, or at least that they obey a set of predictable rules you can take advantage of to force it to.
Makes me wonder if the CIA is working on it, imagine being able to interview the demon that was possessing Putin after you find it harassing a middle school teacher in Kentucky.
You might like the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross. It's about mostly government trying to deal with an attack from Lovecraftian monsters which aren't so different from demons.
The official position on the likes of that, so far as I gather, is that it's risky. Get too interested in playing Stupid Person Tricks with the demon, and you're falling for its lure, which is to get you more and more involved with it and establish a relationship with it.
Any thing it might do, such as predict dice rolls, is ultimately a bait. Best thing is to tell the demon to shut up and get out of Dodge.
https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1305&context=jams
By the bye, I never at all expected to be having conversations about demons and related theology on Scott's blog. Truly this is worth every cent of the subscription! 😈
I think this a problem of definition. Real magic is fake and fake magic is real kind of a thing.
Every culture has some kind of demon myth and practice of exorcism. So that has reality beyond the iatrogenic demons mentioned here.
Do I believe people get possessed by the arch duke of hell?
No.
Do I believe that people believe they’ve been possessed by the arch Duke of hell and there’s some consistent pattern across all those people?
Evidently so.
I also have weirder thoughts here. All we are is a pattern of electricity moving between neurons. There’s something it feels like to be us on the inside of that pattern that can’t be seen from the outside. Who is to say there isn’t some weird other storm system in that pattern fighting against all the patterns that are most of the rest of me? There’d be degrees of independence. One day we will be able to map all of this and you could probably see these “storms” and maybe even notice similar storm shapes in people with similar systems. Is that a demon? In my mind yes. It doesn’t stop being “magic” because it has an explanation. I think “Moloch” as described in Scott’s big Moloch trap post also has qualia of a kind.
Oh my god, I'm so embarrassed for my profession.
Don't be, there are crazy fringe practitioners in every profession and walk of life. It's a real problem for the soft sciences, such as psychotherapy, because we can't really see the workings of the inside of our heads (sure, we can examine the brain, but what the heck is going on with the mind? *where* is the mind?) which means that any theory has a good chance of "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks".
It's your Id/Ego/Superego? It's the animus and anima and shadow? It's Parts? It's DEMONS? Who the heck knows, it seems to work for some of them anyway!
EDIT: Hey, there's even a paper about demons and psychology!
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=103231
"The idea that humans can be inhabited by supernatural entities is widespread among cultures and religions around the world. Demonic possession is sometimes encountered by clinicians who choose to understand it as the actual presence of a demon possessing a human, or as a psychological phenomenon. Some forms of Christianity hold to the belief that demonic possession occurs in reality. Clinicians who share these beliefs may abandon a psychological understanding and treatment of the phenomenon in favor of religious explanations and rituals. Eastern religions like Buddhism understand demonic possession as relatively real but also see it as ultimately stemming from psychological issues. Psychoanalysis understands demonic possession as the result of interpsychic processes related to disturbances in the development of early internalized object relations. This has a number of implications for treatment of so-called demonically possessed individuals, which is exemplified in two clinical cases."
Alternative explanation: the Eurocentric individualist citadel mind theory evolved during a time when Christianity was strong enough to keep most demons away.
Now that the West is going Post Christian, the demons are returning...
Incredible Writeup ! (atleast with the tools that were used)
But complete lack of treatment from the memetic perspective.
Brain states ARE mind states but the mind is understood thru memes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3Uf1-Hvc8U
Excuse me if this has been covered, but has it been checked whether there actually are a lot of IFS practitioners saying they occasionally run into demons?
Supposing that's true and also that there are no demons, why would people have demon-like parts?
Suggestion.
Boring explanation for demon-like parts: Parts are subject to evolutionary pressure to continue, they use a lot of different strategies, and sounding like a demon is one possibility.
We tend to anthropomorphize whatever we look at. So if we look at shadow/unintegrated parts (from the perspective of the self as PR agent to the rest of the tribe) you get...
They might be a less specific version of the idea of "introjects" sometimes discussed in relation to dissociative identity disorder. An introject is supposed to be a split-off personality created to model and better predict another person. So, for example, a victim of prolonged abuse might have an introject of their abuser because being able to predict the abuser is really important. But, once the abuse has stopped, the introject might persist despite being no longer needed, and then it will just negatively influence the person instead of serving any useful protective purpose.
So in cases where an alternate personality presents as a demon, maybe it's actually an introject, only it's modeling something fuzzier than a single abuser, possibly multiple abusers or a whole abstract situation.
On the opposite end, it could be a personality split off specifically to be aggressively opposed to a traumatizing person/situation, sort of like how gargoyles, which cerainly look demonic, are put on churches to scare off real demons. One way to frighten away evil is by superficially out-eviling it, and pretending to be a literal demon is about as far as you can go in that direction. The psychiatrist Scott Peck, who is mentioned briefly in the book review, refers to the phenomenon of adopting evilish personality traits as a defensive measure against evil as "psychological gargoylism."
Edit: More simply, a person's Jungian Shadow, all of the traits and impulses they have but which their conscious mind rejects, might call itself a demon since that's how the person sees it on some level.
+1, consistent with some of my experiences working with traumatized people.
>Supposing that's true and also that there are no demons, why would people have demon-like parts?
Hmm... Consider one prosaic experience many (most?) people have had of a parallel process running in their brain:
Working on a problem, running into a roadblock or snag, setting it aside and doing something else for hours or days, say cooking a meal, for the sake of an explicit example, and having the solution "pop into one's mind".
Presumably some part of one's mind is still working on the problem while "doing something else - perhaps consciously choosing how much salt to add to a dish", but not at the level of conscious awareness.
Maybe a process like that can malfunction in some way, and it doesn't "feel" like it is someone one is consciously "doing" - like adding the salt, but it instead feels like it just "pops up" - but less usefully than the solution to a problem...
I both think this is batshit crazy, and suspect this therapy could help my brother. He has debilitating depression and often talks about the disturbing thoughts that come into his brain - and wonders why they get there. I bet some metaphoric story telling could help him work through that.
But good God I fear this becoming main stream!
A perhaps related but more nuts-and-bolts concept is Shard Theory which is an approach to analysing the behaviour of AI neural networks. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqkGmfikqapbJ2YMj/shard-theory-an-overview
The relevance is that with a NN (at least in some designs?) you essentially start with a bunch of random functions that themselves don't change that much during training - rather the relative weighting of each shard/function changes more. By analogy humans can't drastically rewire our brains so rather we want to make smaller changes to emphasise/use our good parts and de-emphasize/ignore our bad ones. Disclaimer: not an expert, could be mangling things.
As a schizophrenic who has basically got the condition 100% under control without meds through occult BS like Jungian archetypes and some tactical religion I feel pretty redeemed from this.
Yeah, demons are real, schizos are shamans, open your third eye, but as usual, keep it from the normies. Only the shaman was meant to see these dimensions for a good reason.
Also Jesus saves, would have liked a closer look at the finding of the IFS guys that the Christian exorcists were so much better than the Chinese exorcists that they adapted their techniques. The catholic church still has an exorcist squad around, and I dug into that for a while, they are doing "something" there, and whatever the hell (heh) the scientific basis for a demon or an unattached burden is, the Catholic exorcists have by far the best psychotechnology to cure it.
Another partial explanation for the miraculous early successes for IFS and other "new" therapies could be due to effects on the therapist rather than the patient. The excitement of a new method for helping patients may raise the abilities of the practitioner, allowing them to communicate on a deeper level than they would otherwise. Thus the method itself is not entirely relevant beyond the therapist's hope for what it could be.
Intuitively I feel confident that this would be at least a non-negligible part of the story, am curious to hear what others think. Would appreciate it if there are better terms to describe this as well.
One issue is when IFS therapists or coaches TELL clients they have an unattached burden / malevolent entity within them - Ive come across several examples of this and wrote about it in this piece - https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/does-internal-family-systems-implant
> First, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain.
This looks like a process prone to a pretty high failure rate. I'd call it a huge success if it works in 80% of cases (which is more or less on par with everything else in psychology).
So if you go on and take 1% of cases which are glaringly different and pretend that the original assumption still holds...
Full disclosure, practicing Roman Catholic here, the obvious problem with Alexander's materialist debunking of the IFS thesis about demons is that all of those therapists will be intimately familiar with those arguments and indeed believe them themselves until that belief was stubbornly beaten out of them by reality. Anyway, this was a fascinating read. Of all the Christian/religious beliefs, the existence of literal demons is surely among the most obvious and empirically proven ones.
I don't think you can be triumphalist about this, the demons described work pretty differently from Catholic ones (eg some of them are dead souls, some are possibly extraterrestrials, if you lecture them enough they can choose redemption and disappear into Heaven at any moment). Falconer is a New Age spiritualist and the demons seem to follow roughly his brand of New Age spiritualism.
I think you would have to go for a "the demons are faking him out" perspective which is at least as implausible as my materialist one.
For what it's worth, I'm a practicing psychiatrist, and the two demon cases I've been tangentially involved in (one patient during training, and the semi-cult I linked in the article) both seemed obviously fake - which of course doesn't rule out that other people have found realer ones.
I'm hardly an expert in Catholic demonology, though I'm not sure I follow why demons faking him out would be "at least as implausible as materialism." If demons are real, then demons lying is surely the least implausible thing about them. This reminds me of people who say things like "I believe in God, but not virgin births and bodily resurrections"--if God can create the Universe out of nothing, He can certainly make a virgin birth happen, the hard thing to believe is the existence of God bit, not the miracles bit.
Anyway, I do know that Catholic exorcists today still keep very busy and work closely with scientifically-trained psychiatrists, you may have already seen this piece: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/01/as-a-psychiatrist-i-diagnose-mental-illness-and-sometimes-demonic-possession/
Anecdotally, I live in a major first world city with world-class medical institutions etc. and one of the diocese exorcists happens to be my former pastor; he's a highly intelligent, down-to-earth guy with a great self-deprecating sense of humor, which seems like exactly the sort of person you'd want in such a role if you want to take equally seriously the possibility of fake demons and real demons.
The washington post piece is from the psychiatrist Richard Gallagher who has worked together with exorcists a lot. He actually wrote a book on the topic, which I found very interesting: https://www.amazon.de/Demonic-Foes-Psychiatrist-Investigates-Possessions-ebook/dp/B07MK37K4F His job basically is to rule out any sort of mental illness or trickery on the part of the possessed person. Though he does not exorcise them (since that is the job of the Roman Catholic priest), he functions as a consultant on the case. The people that Gallagher works with, however, are quite different than the ones Falconer describes. They sound a lot more like the real deal: Gallagher claims that some of them have exhibited remarkable knowledge about things they could not have known (apparently one possessed woman told him how his mother died) or have shown superhuman strength (he recounts how a small woman threw an ex-marine twice her weight across the room). Others have spoken Latin or other foreign languages in their possessed states, which they were actually unable to speak (I think there was a hilarious example in the book were a demon comments on an English prayer in Latin, mocking the priest or something). Apparently there is even a Hollywood movie in the making about the story. To the point of demons lying about who they are, Gallagher has numerous examples of this: One possessed person originally claimed to be possessed by Zeus; another woman claimed to be possessed by the spirit of a dead person. Both ultimately acknowledged that they have been fooled. I think Gallagher even hinted that some alien encounters might be demonic. Though apparently the vast majority of alleged cases are fake. Gallagher obviously believes that demonic possession exists, but claims that it is extremely rare and that he has only seen it in his role as possession consultant (various exorcists sent their cases to him to be observed) and never as a hospital psychiatrist.
Thank you for this explanation. The way you describe Gallagher's process is my understanding of how Catholic exorcists work with psychiatrists generally.
>the hard thing to believe is the existence of God bit, not the miracles bit
Hmm, not really? It seems to me that deism is pretty compatible with a materialist-reductionist worldview, whereas an arbitrarily interventionist god is much harder to reconcile.
I don't think it's implausible that demons like when eg they say they're extraterrestrials.
But Falconer uses an extremely un-Catholic exorcism where he tells the demons to choose to return to light and goodness. And then the patient sees visions of it working, the demons stop bothering them, and they feel much better. If this didn't really work, it would require a conspiracy among demons to leave their victims as soon as someone tried this exorcism, abandoning their chance to victimize further for, I don't know, a chance to trick people into thinking an exorcism worked? This is the part that seems implausible to me, or at least not less implausible than it just being normal hallucination.
Yes, that’s a good point.
As a Catholic, I do believe in the existence of demons. What is going on with what Falconer describes, though, I have no idea. There's a lot that sounds very dodgy.
Of course, demons are notoriously liars. And occult traditions outside of conventional religion have their own explanation for what demons etc. might be, which are not the devils and demons of Christianity. Not to mention different faiths which have different views on departed spirits (e.g. dybbuks in Judaism).
But ghosts of the dead and extraterrestrials and epigenetic memories are going a little too far. I think that there is something to the notion that there are parts of the patient's mind where they have personified their problems, and these are built up into being "That's not me, that's a whole separate other thing" which can be identified as demons, but I think Falconer and his set of therapists are going overboard in their enthusiasm.
So to try and sum up my scattered notions:
(1) Do I believe in the existence of demons? Yes
(2) Could Falconer et al be encountering people who have indeed been obsessed or possessed by demons? Possible
(3) How likely is this? There's the rub. I think not as much as they seem to think; this is the reverse of advice on exorcism to "first, have the person assessed by a psychiatrist to make sure it's not mental illness". This seems to require "have the person assessed by an exorcist to make sure it's really a demon"
(4) What about the ghosts and aliens and inherited forces? Yeah, I think this is where it gets blurry and messy and too New Age-y
(5) It gives me the strong sensation as when reading accounts of séances in early Spiritualism where it was "let's all sit around in a circle and open ourselves to the spirits and invite them in" where my reaction is "No! What are you doing? This is dangerous! Not all spirits are nice and friendly!"
(6) Falconer seems to be well aware that these are not nice and friendly spirits, but still - the whole talking to them, persuading them, and relying on personal authority and the patient's own mental powers to cast them out if they won't go willingly makes me antsy
(7) But do I really think this is dangerous? Actually, yes? In two ways: (a) if it's indeed interior mental states and there are loose cannon therapists treating them as literal demons, that's going to mess up a lot of vulnerable, suggestible people (b) if it's indeed literal demons, then working to cast them out is indeed the best way to go, but just talking to them and trying to persuade them to 'move to the light' isn't reassuring me as backed up by very much. Also, messing around with demons in general isn't a good idea.
Here we insert the Lewis quotes from "The Screwtape Letters":
"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."
"When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all he pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The "Life Force", the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"—then the end of the war will be in sight."
Okay, time for some technical terms!
https://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Demonology/Demonology_005.htm
Distinction between obsession and possession:
"Before going into a more detailed explanation, it might be well to just briefly define possession and obsession and distinguish how they differ from one another.
When the devil attacks the body of a human being from the outside, we call this obsession. When, however, the evil spirit assumes control of a human soul from within, we call that possession."
Two types of possession (e.g. why Falconer is not seeing the magic powers type: "None of his patients start speaking Latin with no previous exposure, or levitate, or shoot fire out of their eyes"):
"Specialists in the study of possession distinguish between two kinds of possessions. Some possessions manifest psychiatric phenomena; others manifest phenomena that are beyond psychiatric analysis.
Possessions that Parallel Psychiatric Changes. Persons who are possessed can manifest bodily changes which are familiar in the science of psychiatry. The devil exercises control over their bodies by using them as he wills. He may immobilize the self-control of the individual. It is, so to speak, “a change of command.” The possessed body moves, speaks and acts but is no longer under the control of the individual. It is now directed and manipulated as a blind instrument, obeying a stronger power or personality that forcibly dominates it. The human person is no longer the one who acts; it is rather the devil acting through the body of the individual.
Possessed persons in their external behavior will manifest phenomena that are very similar to those of certain mental illnesses, characterized by dual personality or the presence of an internal principle that causes the abnormal behavior.
But in cases of possession there will always be the strong aversion to the sacred or anything that was a source of spiritual consolation before the possession. In many cases this aversion may extend to the moral and physical order.
In cases of real diabolical possession, the individual may give evidence of his or her abnormal state by facial changes and distortions, by complete relaxation or by rigidity of the body. When asked to perform some act of piety or devotion, the possessed person will always react in a more or less violent manner with contortions of bodily members, threats, and frightening shouts, or with provocative blasphemies and sacrilegious bodily movements. At other times, the possessed victim may try to put an end to the requests and expectations by lapsing into a state of complete passivity. At the persistent repeated command, “In the name of God,” to perform some act of devotion, such as kissing a holy image or genuflecting, the possessed person may obey, but will do so with great repugnance and even with contempt for the person who commands it.
This diabolical repugnance to anything sacred is also expressed in relation to what had once been a source of moral or physical relief to the individual. Then the possessed person becomes withdrawn, avoids the company of others, and refuses to engage in conversation. The one possessed may hardly be able to express his or her wishes and the bodily functions may be seriously affected.
All that we have so far said about this kind of possession may resemble a psychopathological condition. However, one prime key to distinguish possession from psychopathology is the universal opposition, even hatred of everything which has to do with God, or the Eucharist, or the Blessed Virgin, or the saints or, in general, whatever is sacred.
Possessions that are Beyond Psychological Explanation. In the second form of possession, it is the devil who is the direct active agent. The power he exercises in the possessed person is beyond the capacity of any human being.
The following are some of the phenomena that characterize this more extreme form of possession. The possessed person is unable to maintain a stable posture or to move around or is able to carry out certain functions or activities which the individual had never learned before. The variety of these activities is beyond counting. It may involve the ability to sing or to paint or speak or understand foreign languages which had never been learned. The one possessed may acquire the knowledge of persons, objects, or events that are long past, hidden, or at a great distance. At other times, the person will rise from the ground and remain suspended in the air in the levitation or will move through the air or perform amazing bodily feats. Or again, he or she will be able to move heavy objects or furniture without touching them, or cause these objects to rise above the ground. Under the influence of the devil, a person is able to open or close doors or windows from a distance, cause huge paintings to fall from the walls, shattering objects at a great distance.
To be emphasized is that this type of possession is entirely different from what we are calling psychic possession. This one is beyond all psychological power."
It's not your fault (unless you deliberately invoke the spirits):
"What we are seeing in the modern world is not only phenomenal diabolical obsession or possession. Both of these can be, and we may say generally are, inculpable on the part of those who have to endure the devil’s cruelty."
" At the persistent repeated command, “In the name of God,” to perform some act of devotion, such as kissing a holy image or genuflecting, the possessed person may obey, but will do so with great repugnance and even with contempt for the person who commands it."
I don't know if you or anyone here needs to be told this, but that's an incredibly bad test. There are a lot of non-Catholics who would fail that test. I'm thinking of a lot of Jews, but possibly also Protestants with a prejudice against Catholicism and atheist who are still affected by symbolism. And, of course, stubborn people who don't want to be told what to do.
It is written from, and for, a Catholic perspective. I presume you could use sacred items from the person's culture, be that a Bible, Koran, or the like. Dealing with people who have been "look, I've been an atheist all my life" might require persuasion around "just humour me?"
I agree that severe reactions against "I don't want to do this" could be down to demons, or just natural stubbornness and in reaction to bad experiences (a lot of online atheists seem to have come out of fundamental American Protestantism).
"the demons described work pretty differently from Catholic ones (eg some of them are dead souls, some are possibly extraterrestrials, if you lecture them enough they can choose redemption and disappear into Heaven at any moment)."
Here is the perfect moment for this scene from "The Fearless Vampire Killers":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goqj9oWFhMw
"If you lecture them enough they can choose redemption and disappear into Heaven at any moment"
Maybe they're Jewish demons?
"The Jewish exorcism ritual is performed by a rabbi who has mastered Kabbalah. Also present is a minyan (a group of ten adult males), who gather in a circle around the possessed person.
...(T)he rabbi begins to communicate with it and ask it questions such as why it is possessing the body of the possessed. The minyan may pray for it and perform a ceremony for it in order to enable it to feel safe, and so that it can leave the person's body."
I’m a believer so curious as to your thinking in this. Does the spiritual element of this go away for you if we can rigorously explain the material side of this? It doesn’t for me.
If there’s some recurring storm system pattern that you find swirling around in peoples brains and they experience that as a demon, well hey, that’s a demon is.
I also wouldn’t expect it to be able to share information across distances or be able to know anything that wasn’t experienced by the person it’s riding.
We are weird electrical storms in neural tissues and have experience. It fits for me that other things that exist as weird electrical patterns in brains have experience.
And also that people would sometimes pretend to have them to evade responsibility.
Sure, it's true that supernatural entities, including God, prefer to act through natural means.
And there's the question of causation. If someone is having a spiritual experience while in an MRI machine, and the MRI machine shows a bunch of neurons firing up, does that mean that the neurons firing are causing the spiritual experience, or that the spiritual experience caused the neurons firing?
That's all true but Catholics do believe that miracles--outright violations of the laws of the natural world, not just weird coincidences--can and do occur.
This might be a definitional problem. God’s nature must be natural to Himself. I don’t doubt that there are/could be events that I would have no way to explain that I would describe as miraculous but I would also describe things that I can explain as miraculous. But I would also take, as a matter of faith, those events were still consistent with the higher order and there was some way to understand them even if I personally never figure it out.
Take evolution for instance. Go back in time before that was explained to occur by Natural Selection. Someone tells you that the fabric of reality itself, just by people choosing who they will marry, have children with, etc ensures that positive traits are passed on more commonly and that negative traits become less common and that that sort of union and choosing was at the heart of all the world around you that you observed. You’d say “truly, this is the hand of God at work” but then if they got a little bit more explicit and were a dour old man you’d say “this sucks, I can explain it now, there’s no mystery left.”
Just because I can see a “demon” in an MRI image and describe it phenomenological that doesn’t mean I can make any definitive statements about what a demon feels like on the inside. That’s a question outside of the scope of science. But my guess is there is something like “The feeling of what it is to be a demon” but that a lot of people who say they have one are simply trying to evade responsibility. However, obviously not all of this is iatrogenic. It happens in the wild.
I question the "hear as in a trance" part of Scott's description. I've never done IFS, but is it really supposed to be like that?
In the Buddhist tradition of Chod, it is, I think, more like meditative attention directed to a feeling + some sort of imaginative synesthesia, viz. "what do I think this this feeling/emotion would look like if it had an appearance."
On the other hand, it appears that in the Buddhist tradition you can, if you feel brave, stack Chod with lucid dreaming. Thus, become lucid in the dream, dream-transform yourself in Vajrayogini, recite the Chod liturgy and then wait around for whatever sort of demon feels like showing up in your dream.
(The Andrew Holechek book on lucid dreaming briefly alludes to this.)
In my experience, lucid dreamers have developed a very high tolerance for having a Bad Time in lucid dreams. "Sure, I'll induce a dream where I'm summoning demons in a charnel ground. Why not?"
It's interesting that what the schizophrenia literature calls "source monitoring" is inactive in dreams. Most people, most of the time, can distinguish their own visualisations/voice in the head from real perceptions. And yet, we mostly mistake dreams (which are creations of our own brains) for reality, and most people find lucid dreaming to be really difficult. Typically, you need an intellectual realisation "Although this experience feels completely real to me I know that this must be a dream because I just did a reality check and it failed. And that talking giraffe would be kind of unlikely in a real experience"
Fun. For a study, we are reviewing mainstream depression treatment manuals. We find that the therapists get a lot of mileage out of the whole “you’re literally serotonin deficient” playbook (and also epigenetic trauma, candidate genes etc. etc.). Maybe they’re reluctant to give up on these stories even though the evidence for them is poor because they feel they need them for therapy, because patients desire stories like this that somehow identify an external, fixable cause for their problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4PC8Luqiws
couldn't help myself
I'm curious to see how the trajectory of this will go. Will the current rise of of IFS as a therapy lead to Satanic Panic 2.0 (probably about something other than literal satanists this time) before being beaten back by a wave of therapists being sued into oblivious by their patients for malpractice? I think it's useful to look at the trajectory of the initial MPD craze (well described in Acocella's book Creating Hysteria, first chapter available here: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/acocella-hysteria.html) rising in the 80s as therapists taught each other, started conferences, and overall had good intentions wanting to expose the way child abuse is covered up in our society. But then fell rapidly from around 1993 as the cracks started showing and the malpractice lawsuits started winning big time.
TBH i really prefer the plural communities to any of this therapist led stuff. I mean the plurals are also cringy, but overall the communities seem to be interesting people trying to understand their own minds, and the lack of strong authority figures seems to contain the blast radius somewhat.
While I think Falconer is probably sincere, due to his own backstory of childhood abuse, the problem I foresee is the crazier 'therapists' out there who will jump on this and impress it upon suggestible and vulnerable patients, convince them that they're possessed by demons/revenants/what have you, and then be unable to undo this by their 'exorcism'. Thus leaving them much worse off than when they started, and no other method of therapy able to undo the damage (how well does "I'm possessed by a demon" go down when you go in to a conventional psychiatrist?)
I can see this going the same way as the worst of the Recovered Memory débacle:
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3221
"In September 1969, an 8-year-old girl disappeared in Foster City, California. Her body was found three months later, a few miles from her home. Twenty years later, in 1989, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, the daughter of George Franklin, reported that she had recovered a memory indicating that her father had murdered and raped the girl. Eileen provided numerous details that matched details of the crime scene and, on the basis of her memory, George Franklin was arrested and charged with murder. Eileen testified at Franklin’s trial about her recovered memory. Much of the trial focused on the reliability of repressed memory and each side presented experts.
...The jury found Franklin guilty of first degree murder in November 1990, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
...While the case was awaiting retrial, Eileen Franklin's sister, Janice Franklin, revealed that Eileen Franklin's repressed memory was recalled through hypnosis. Both had testified at trial that Eileen had not been hypnotized.
Because the state Supreme Court had ruled that testimony based on memories “recovered” by hypnosis is unreliable, Eileen could have been barred from taking the stand at a new trial.
Further, Eileen Franklin's credibility was called into question because she later contended that she remembered two more murders committed by her father: the rape-murders of 18-year-old Veronica Cascio and 17-year-old Paula Baxter. But DNA tests conducted on the rape kits in 1995 identified a male DNA profile that was not Franklin.
In July 1996, prosecutors announced they would not retry Franklin for the murder of the girl, and he was released. Franklin later filed a federal lawsuit seeking compensation, but the lawsuit was dismissed. In 2018, the DNA evidence linked Rodney Lynn Halbower to the Cascio and Baxter murders. He was convicted of both murders and sentenced to life in prison."
" If the demon doesn’t believe you, challenge it to touch the light. When it refuses, mock its cowardice (demons are very proud, and hate to be mocked)."
I honestly don't know if this guy is just rewriting "The Screwtape Letters" because that line immediately reminded me of the two quotations at the start:
"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn."—Luther
"The devill . . the prowde spirite . . cannot endure to be mocked."—Thomas More
Also from the Screwtape letters, despite not being part of any major denominations teaching: "Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven"
That may be a reference to Universalism, and even the theory that the Devil could be saved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocatastasis
"In theology, apocatastasis is the restoration of creation to a condition of perfection. In Christianity, it is a form of Christian universalism that includes the ultimate salvation of everyone—including the damned in Hell and the Devil."
Controversial, and argued for and against that some of the Church Fathers held it, chiefly Clement of Alexandria and Origen.
I don't want to put words into Lewis' mouth; he may be indicating there that *if* ever the devils could understand Divine Love, they could be reconciled to God - but they can't, in large part because they've deliberately cut themselves off and refused to repent.
I looked at the image for this post and thought, "Wow, I've got to dial back my scorn for AI generated images. This is great." Spent quite a while looking it over, finding more and more creepy delights. So then I did a reverse image search and learned it's a Dali painting.
Dali did it first! 😁
I don’t do IFS often but when I do, in my conversations with my parts, I consistently sometimes learn surprising new things about myself that ring very true & occasionally help me in my life, and that feel like I never would have thought of them from a unitary perspective.
So, even ignoring the whole topic of what is true about the mind / my mind, empirically it is a useful way of looking.
"You might, starting from a Western scientific point of view, object that the patient’s problems really are misfiring brain circuits, so surely that perspective would work better. Even granting that you’re objectively scientifically right, I’m not sure I buy the syllogism."
A counterpoint would be belief in "free will". A Western scientific point of view has no ready explanations for what such experiences actually correspond to, and yet people claiming to believe in it have statistically better life outcomes.
Do they?
That seems to be the consensus. I haven't looked into it myself much though, and the usual replication crisis-related precautions apply in this general vicinity of course.
One of the many things wrong with the demon idea: If your patient expresses rage, hatred and the desire to destroy you and everything else, why the hell do you have to posit a demon to explain that? I have heard quite a few bitterly unhappy people say they hate everybody and hope every person on the planet fucking dies in agony. Every single male patient I've seen who was friendless and isolated in high school has eventually told me that he considered shooting up his high school. (By the time they told me, all were 10 or more years older, no longer fantasized about shooting into crowds. and had never been violent even in minor ways.) Several patients had told me they hated me because, as they saw it, I had had it easy in life and now made a good living in an easy profession. Some others hated me on and off because they were fond of me and felt demeaned by having to pay for contact with someone they liked a lot. You don't need demons to explain rage and hatred. Duh.
I like to show up on posts like this and mention that, if demons are the kind of thing people generally think they are, objective science won't be able to either prove or disprove their existence.
An earthworm scientist could have a very well-developed objective theoretical understanding of rocks, dirt, water, maybe things like mole tunnels and tree roots. There's a cause and effect involved in those things that they could reliably manipulate and get deterministic results.
This is not true of the robins that prey on the earthworms. What experiment would you propose an earthworm scientist should do to determine whether or not robins exist?
A robin tried to eat my cousin and she survived, I swear! She got pinched in a sharp hard thing and pulled upwards, into another realm called "the air"! That's how the robins disappear from one point on the ground and appear at another one, without moving through the intervening dirt: they "fly" through the "air", just like how we dig through the ground. I swear I'm not crazy!
Let me mention one more point: before 2004, the giant squid was a cryptid. You were dumb if you believed in it, because its existence hadn't been verified by objective science. Then, in 2004, some scientists took a bunch of pictures of one. Now it has a wikipedia page and everything.
If you found yourself in the middle of the ocean, having to fight a giant squid, the failure of objective scientists to verify its existence isn't a very big help to you.
I'm trying to find sources on the over diagnoses of multiple personalities in the 80s due to suggestive therapists that Scott mentioned. Anyone know of sources on this?
"But I’m also happy we’re not holding Demon Awareness Campaigns in random middle schools full of impressionable kids."
Middle school is American "for students between the ages of 11 and 14 years"? Okay! Certainly no stories of demons being told in my time!
*kicks under the desk the stories of the mortifications of Venerable Matt Talbot we 12 year old girls were told, and where I first heard about the use of the discipline etc.*
https://www.catholicireland.net/saintoftheday/matt-talbot-the-workers-saint/
"Prayers and Mortifications
Matt Talbot mortified himself rigorously. He slept on a plank bed with a piece of timber for a pillow. This left his face numb in later years. He slept in chains which he wore for 14 years before his death, round his leg and on his body."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Talbot
"Talbot was on his way to Mass on Trinity Sunday, 7 June 1925, when he collapsed and died of heart failure on Granby Lane in Dublin. Nobody at the scene was able to identify him. His body was taken to Jervis Street Hospital, where he was undressed, revealing the extent of his austerities. A chain had been wound around his waist, with more chains around an arm and a leg, and cords around the other arm and leg. The chains found on his body at death were not some extreme penitential regime but a symbol of his devotion to Mary, Mother of God that he wished to give himself to her totally as a slave."
I am vastly amused that the commentary on this post has moved on to discussions of theology for various faiths, not just sticking to considerations of various schools of psychotherapy 😀
>Falconer suggests that maybe he’s dealing with low-grade possession cases, and the more traditional exorcisms with Latin and incense and days-long epic battles are the more serious ones.
Falconer's cases are selected for those who are willingly in therapy.
There's lots to potentially say about this from the perspective of how the Buddhist tradition has worked with it, but I think the most important bit you got right: playing games with what 'counts as real' is part of demon-sport. A Hallmark signature of these patterns is that they want your engagement, positive or negative, because any attention is better than no attention. Trying to avoid and suppress them is another kind of engagement, which is why we want an attitude of equanimity towards them. That is to say being in a state where one can observe them but not assign any special significance to them over other phenomena. Going either below or above the level of abstraction on which they live can work well for this. IFS is going up a level, observing them as part of a whole collection of internal entities. Insight meditation practice is going down a level, noticing that they are compound phenomena made up of a whole bunch of things, and like all other phenomena, the sorts of things they report about themselves and the world don't hold up very well to direct observation and tend to dissolve away.
Since leaving, I didn't have any inclination to dig into all the Scientology exposé materials; I just wanted out. But I can say that like many cults and extreme ideologies, Scientology is full of sincere, well-intentioned, dedicated people working hard to save the world. They really believe it, they just don't realise how far out they've gone, and how manipulative and doomed the system is.
And part of what makes it so hard to leave is the fact that - dare I say it - Scientology contains a lot of good heuristics which can actually help a person who is struggling in life. Face your fears, be honest, develop your communication skills, help others, cherish the family, keep your integrity and your sense of humour, keep away from drugs, prioritise the spiritual above the material.
Unfortunately, the underlying theory of these heuristics is a bunch of elaborate nonsense. When you've been helped with Scientology, the tendency is to swallow that theology as the reason why things got better. From there on, it's a slippery slope to a lifetime of delusion and entrapment.
Unsurprisingly Scientologists are not well educated, especially in the sciences and critical thinking. The typical recruit also has some combination of vulnerable/gullible, and idealistic/magical thinking. Which is why the demographic they have most success recruiting is teens and young adults, especially women. It's also why you never see any impressive Scientology apologists in the public sphere, even though when you step back and think about it, it's not as crazy as many other religions whose bizarre mythology seems to have been grandfathered in.
All this sort of stuff is so alien to me. I have always been so hard minded, didn't grok what people saw in Catholicism even when I was like 8-10. Kept waiting for the additional info that would make it be something other than the same fairy tales everyone knew were false or the Greek gods everyone knew were silly cultural practices. Obviously that info never came.
Anyway, I feel really bad for all these people whose minds are so fractured or beyond their control.
I had a lot of trauma and legit terrible things happen my youth, but I never had anything like this, and while the deep depression I was in for a decade did sometimes feel almost like some malevolent force, it never remotely felt like another mind, and I got over all that without medication eventually besides once I grew up and had some success/control in life. IDK my mind has always seemed so unitary and rock solid. I procrastinate a bit more than I should, and have trouble controlling my eating. Other than those two things I am pretty much my own man.
The idea of having some fractured mental space just seems awful and almost impossible to even imagine,
I'm a Wiccan and a mystic with over 40 years of study and experience in the kind of phenomena Falconer describes (though I'm, er, better known for other things). Some reactions:
1. Some poor goof finding out that exorcisms actually work against certain kinds of derangement is not new. The poor goof writing a book about it isn't novel either. Usually it's a priest rather than a secular therapist. Look up Gabriele Amorth for a recent example. There have been others. The 1973 movie "The Exorcist" was inpired by a successful demon-banishment back in 1949.
2. More generally, it's hilarious how people have to keep rediscovering practical magic. No matter how often we dismiss it as pre-scientific nonsense, the problems it addresses keep comiing back and requiring the same countermeasures against them to be rediscovered.
3. I think your rationalist/materialist explanatory theory of what's going on is pretty much spot on. It has a practical flaw, though, which I'll get back to.
4. I caution you against taking Falconer's idea of a perfect central Self too seriously. My own experience suggests that Buddhist psychology is more accurate; it's all subsystems and masks, all the way down, and that "central Self" is merely one of the subsystems - a narratizer that mistakes its point of view for some kind of objective reality (Julian Jaynes to the white courtesy phone, please!). To this illusion the best reply is still the Heart Sutra: "Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, svaha!"
Back to the practical flaw: the problem with materialist/rationalist explanations of this stuff is that while they are sound theory if you're seeking consilience with other kinds of knowledge, they don't generate effective practice. To engage with and manipulate these internal subsystems it's best to address them in language they understand - chanting and repetitive motion, emotionally powerful symbolism, the evocation of god-forms. Using sterile terms like "autohypnosis" isn't wrong exactly, but it isn't helpful, either.
Every time this happens - every time someone stumbles over "Exorcisms work? Who knew?" I'm over here in my corner thinking "Well, duh!" and laughing. The sad part is that people who notice this usually end up overcommitting to some sort of supernaturalist belief system that multiplies entities way beyond necessity. That is, if they weren't stuck there already.
That kind of overcommitment is another reason I agree with you that we shouldn't do Demon Awareness Campaigns. Yeah, sure, they will cause people with poorly integrated personalities to narratize themselves into a crazier state; but that's a small danger. The larger peril is that they might cause our entire society to narratize itself into a crazier state - Carl Sagan's demon-haunted world.
Yeah, you aren't wrong when you notice that the "citadel mind" is a story we tell ourselves that tends to suppress some kinds of psychological and social failure modes. But. Falconer isn't wrong either when he complains that this has largely amputed our capacity for spiritual experience - or to put it more operationally, it has amputated our capability to reach some deep and important kinds of self-knowledge.
It doesn't have to be this way. The underlying problem is historical; we have nonsensical toxic categories like "supernatural" wired deep into the language and assumptions of our culture (see also: why Buddhists think we're all crazy). If we didn't, the transitions into and out of the ritual circle would be easier and less likely to make people attach themselves to crazy belief systems about themselves and the world.
Addressing that cultural problem is harder than addressing individual psychological issues. Some of us are trying, nevertheless.
This. All of this.
I am ever dumbfounded by rationalist thinking that totally dismisses anything occult, spiritual, supernatural, etc as non-factual and woo.
And who evidently fail to notice that, for literally millennia, the most powerful sociopolitical technologies of humankind are totally dipped in ritual, ceremony, music, rhythm, symbolism, etc.
What if the objective truth isn’t “sky ghost is as literally real as gravity,” what if the objective truth is “your tribal mind plugs into a lot of deep layers of subjective perception and influence that science cannot possibly explain or harness because it’s orthogonal, and actively hostile, to the means of understanding those layers.” And “sky ghost” just happens to be memetic technology that slots right past objective, causal understanding (as science defines it, anyway).
And then meanwhile, somehow, nootropics get a pass because... pharmaceuticals are chemicals, I guess? So as long as Mendeleev’s involved on some level then it’s ok to go plowing off into psychedelic experience. Science!! But magic, you go fuck right off, you woo cult nimrods. smh
This entire article reminds me of past life regressions. Those experiences operate on the same sort of mechanism in the brain. They are quite often as similarly transformative as what’s described here by IFS practitioners. Do they make sense, are they literally true? Fuck if I know. What matters, as Scott observes, is whether or not they are net positive.
What if the objective truth is “your tribal mind plugs into a lot of deep layers of subjective perception and influence that science cannot possibly explain or harness because it’s orthogonal, and actively hostile, to the means of understanding those layers” *and sky ghost is literally false*. Most people, for millennia, have in fact believed that the "memetic technology" is as literally real as gravity.
Yes, that’s a good deal of my point. If there is something at play that’s underpinning the persistence and influence of faith/belief/ritual practice, why not accept that as axiomatic (for now) even as you dispute the factuality of their conclusions? And yet, you have a lot of rationality-inclined people who feel just plain threatened, smug, or hostile when presented with someone’s non-scientific beliefs. It’s counter to reason and truth-seeking.
I find this too credulous.
IFS is "evidenced based" to the extent that a single small paper found it performed as well as CBT in depressed women. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jmft.12184
Even if it's the case it performs equally well, why not go with CBT, which has a stronger evidence base, and no risk of apparent spontaneous demon possession?
I understand this psychotherapist truly believes he's helped his patients, but plenty of people believed that of a myriad of unfounded things. Show me the RCT and I'll believe it. Otherwise, I am more inclined to think he's harming them.
I wonder how this could be connected to AI... can LLMs be possessed by demons? Shouldn't demons be afraid of their hosts being wiped out by Super AGI? Or are they buying tech stock instead?
I just wanted to say that "self-reported data from demons is questionable for at least two reasons" sounds like a Pratchett quote and made laugh out loud.
Same
Yeah, I don’t think we necessarily need to simulate the brain per se, but for once I agree with Yann LeCun when he says he doesn’t think the current LLM architecture gets us to human-level reasoning and planning. At least by itself.
"Falconer treats our Eurocentric individualistic citadel mind as a terrible historical mistake, in which a whole continent foolishly amputated its capacity for spiritual experiences. I think of it as more of a triumph: realizing on some level that belief in demons made them real, we eradicated that belief with the same fervor that we displayed when eradicating smallpox, polio, and all the other causative agents for dangerous medical conditions."
Reverse Keyser Soze be like: "The greatest trick we ever pulled against the Devil was convincing the world he didn’t exist."
In discussions of certain programming languages such as C, "UB" is a common abbreviation for "undefined behavior", i.e., nonstandard code which an implementation is free to interpret however the hell it wants and still be considered standards-conforming. A common joke is "the standard doesn't even forbid such code from making demons fly out of your nose". Ub is also the Italian spelling of Uub, a character from Dragon Ball who is the reincarnation of Majin Buu, "majin" literally meaning "demon person". None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
> But I’m also happy we’re not holding Demon Awareness Campaigns in random middle schools full of impressionable kids.
OTOH, in the small city in central Italy I grew up in, in my catechesis (what's usually called "Sunday school" in English but wasn't held on Sunday there) one of the teachers was an exorcist who was always making a big deal of how demons were real and not to be messed with, and I even heard he had previously even made students listen to recordings of exorcisms.
I've seen several in-depth comments (e.g. Deiseach) regarding the Christian tradition of demon possession, and discussing the Biblical texts regarding the disciples casting out demons, Jesus casting out legion, the sons of Sceva, etc. Not much to add on that front. I just stopped by to mention that I don't think the type of demonic influence that IFS seems to be referencing - if indeed it has any counterpart in the Christian tradition - necessarily would be called demon "possession." The Bible also references devilish influence on people in the sense of temptation - not Exorcist head-spinning where the demon is "in control," but ordinary temptation, persuasion, or suggestion towards sin and wrong-doing. This is more like the Screwtape Letters variety, or the "angel on your right shoulder, devil on your left" motif of popular culture, where the demon is using a modified variety of ordinary persuasion, rather than full possession like the man in the tombs near the Gerasenes.
In the temptation scenario, you would expect everyone to be tempted (regardless of spiritual state - even Jesus was tempted by Satan, though he never succumbed to sin). That sort of influence would be both external, in the sense that it's being directed from without, but also internal, in the sense that spiritual devils presumably would have some ability to access and influence one's thought patterns to lead one to sin (as Screwtape so memorably describes). This would also make more sense as to why IFS might (might) have some effect. Even if IFS does not "cast out" demons in the sense that Jesus cast out legion from the possessed man in the tombs, it might provide some influence countering the particular temptation that a demon is offering at that time. Good advice can come from anywhere, after all, and very few people succumb to literally every temptation that comes. Although mankind is fallen, the image of God is also still there (though corrupted) and people can respond to reason, incentives, and suggestions. The Bible also says "Submit yourselves then, unto God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you." (James 4:7) which might be giving a similar idea that mankind has the ability (though not the inclination, without God's help) to resist temptation.
TL;DR - the "UB" influences suggested by IFS, translated into the traditional Christian framework, might map better to devilish temptation, rather than demonic possession. That would match up more closely for their mode of operation, their susceptibility to IFS influence, and the lack of supernatural head-spinning Exorcist-type phenomena.
As Samuel Beckett illustrated in "Waiting for Godot" by wielding the epithet "critic," in the realm of human existence, artistic creation is a far loftier endeavor - ethically, aesthetically, and otherwise - than the act of criticizing such an endeavor. After all, no one remembers any of Shakespeare's critics.
Nonetheless, while I hate to impugn anyone engaged in artistic creation, as in the case of this author, what, for ***** sake, is he (or she) even talking about?
The ability to view life across multiple, categorical dimensions (as opposed to a rigid, binary framework in which things, people, and ideas are either good or bad) is a hallmark of emotional intelligence.
Nonetheless, I don't possess it nor claim to. Instead, a metric I rely on to parse the quadrillions of images and words I consume on a daily basis is: Is it nonsense or is it not?
In the case of this entry (which I linked to from the end of a Ross Douthat op-ed in the NY Times), it is decidedly the former. This is pure, unadulterated nonsense - literally, metaphorically, and in every other respect.
It neither offers a coherent interpretation of reality nor does it elicit aesthetic pleasure. Instead it embeds whatever point the author presumes to make in an unrelenting stream of verbiage.
The Sokol hoax was a ham-fisted attempt by a conservative critic of academia to illustrate the impunity with which academic journals publish articles w/o concern for their integrity. Nevertheless, it demonstrated that a certain sector of non-peer-reviewed journals possess a predilection for publishing articles that obfuscate reality rather than clarify it.
This article definitively falls into the former category.
Is this a joke? You never reference what the "article" is about in your... unrelenting stream of verbiage. Do you post this on various sites to see if people buy it?
Thomas Aquinas addressed this question of devils repenting (by "devils" I mean "fallen angels," which is what he talked about). In his view, if a mortal falls into sin, they may choose to repent, and if a mortal is in a state of grace, they may fall out of it, by free will. But if an angel is in a state of grace, they will never choose to sin, and if they are in a state of sin, they will never choose to repent; in either case they can see the logic of their position too clearly to choose otherwise. So angels exercise free will only once, at the start of their individual timelines.
(However, it's not that they are created in a state of grace or sin in their first instant of existence. It seems as if they have no first instant; rather, the first instant is one in which they don't yet exist, rather like the notion of an open interval in calculus. That instant of nonexistence is one in which they can choose grace or sin without constraint. Or that's how I read Aquinas's discussion of the matter—it reminded me of what I had learned in real analysis.)
On the other hand, it's something of a puzzle what happened with Lucifer. He must have been in a state of sin, and thus with the identity of Satan, at every point he actually occupied on his timeline; there can't have been any actual instant when he was the Son of the Morning, "in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world": that's a kind of fantasy or imagination of his potential that was never to be realized. That seems to lose us the mythopoeia of the greatest of the angels.
Just wanted to drop a note to say I'm someone who has really benefited from IFS and don't feel that I've had to subscribe to bizarre ideas about multiple beings living inside of me, much less actual demons, though I recognize that the official IFS literature sometimes seems to suggest that this is what it's all about. For me, IFS has just been about developing techniques that allow me to accept my strong emotions and hypersensitivities without being controlled by them. To me, the technique of internally communicating with "parts" is just that, a technique.
I have OCD, which means that I am hypersensitive about certain specific risks, to the point that I can become consumed with doubt and internal debate about whether my choices are going to lead to the feared outcome. My typical coping mechanism (or "compulsion") is rumination, which does not help anything. I've tried and tried to just ignore my fears, or just give into them, and neither of these approaches work. IFS techniques help me avoid being controlled by my fears, even if they still bother me.
With the version of IFS that helps me, I do indeed imagine an internal "part" and try to "communicate" with it. I focus on the raging fear/anxiety inside of me and try to imagine it as a being, and something usually pops into my head pretty easily. To "communicate" with it, I generally take deep breaths and try to access a feeling of gratitude for the work that this "part" is trying to do to protect me. When I can do this, generally, the "part's" "voice" often begins to subside and demand my attention less urgently. Then, I can make decisions with more of a clear head and less rationalizing.
I don't believe I actually have little beings inside of me. I think that what's actually happening is that (1) I'm allowing my extreme emotions to simply be rather than trying to suppress them, (2) I'm refusing to be controlled by my hypersensitivities by creating some separation between them and my calmer, more grounded, more mature and accepting states of mind, and (3) by focusing on gratitude, I'm treating my hypersensitivities in a way that basically makes sense--I guess I do believe that my obsessive fears are basically maladaptive coping mechanisms, poor attempts to help me in some way or another. And I don't feel like I have to access an "angelic" state, as the author says, to do this. I just have to try to access gratitude.
I appreciate the author's concern that we not tell people--especially children--that something crazy is going on inside of them. The passages about demons that he cites are particularly strange. And the way that IFS folks sometimes seem to insist that there really are literal beings inside of us, etc., can be disconcerting too, and I wish that they would recognize the value in explaining what they're doing in a way that actually makes sense. I guess I just wanted to express this experience to show that it's not all that crazy or extreme.
Only tangentially related, but as I keep bouncing aversively off the parts about demons, another question keeps yelling for answers - does anyone know where IFS lines up, or doesn't, with Robert Ornstein's The Evolution of Consciousness? Because I think of the latter as one of those "secretly the way things actually are that no one understands" breakthrough texts that changed how I think about everything, the former is now looking... erm... fraught to me, and the two aren't identical but seem part of the same conversation about normal human consciousness being plural within a single individual.
Promise I will actually finish the article soon. I just have to convince my back-end operating system that reading about demons in psychology isn't the same as touching a hot stove.
How new is this really? It seems a fairly minor variation to "voice dialog" that was around in the 1980s which has further antecedents. Some of the theory/language might be a little different, but the basic practice - treating different modes of the selfing process as separate entites in a theraputic process - well, that is essentially the same. Personally, I found this very useful in a practical way but it also a big impact on my undertanding of human subjectivity, and it's role in biology, and in the world.
I turned away from IFS after I read a book about it where the founder of the therapy had a patient and she slashed her own face after talking to him. That said, I do think the superself/subself descriptors are very useful. A lot of the time you've got two conflicting parts of you that need not conflict, because they're actually the same you. I wrote a bit about this here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FlhCorUFS4TjyNj86gXOcnkg7_QrVVgFO1yrZh453K8/edit
WRT TO DEMONS:
In sciency speak I think demons are well explained: systems of maladaptive coping mechanisms, which cohere into a discernible personality, and which can become socially contagious, especially to those who are closest to us (our near and dear).
These maladptive personalities are toxic and interpersonal (in the sense that they do not exist merely within one person), and, often, because they are contagious to those we are close to, are intergenerational. They tend, in my experience, to incline the affected person, to highly antisocial and destructive behavior I saw this very vividly with my ex-girlfriend and her family. Strikingly similar highly-toxic personality traits, cohering into "another Natasha" which was extremely destructive to her own happiness and frankly my own. This same personality pattern manifested quite visibly in her mother, with whom she was closest.
I'd also agree that in her case, and the case below that I'm going to talk about, such socially transmissible systems of maladaptive coping mechanisims, cohering into one coherent personality, different from the "main" personality of the affected person, "enter" via something bad happening, either caused by oneself or others. And insofar as they incline the patient to other risky, immoral, or toxic behavior, they do "invite" or "open the door" for more similar entities to develop.
So although the language is metaphorical, it is an extremely useful and well-elaborated metaphor, and after a certain point, a good metaphor simply amounts a good description of reality.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:
Curiously, the experience with my girlfriend and her family was not the only time I had experienced demon things. I have found one in myself, after quite a lot of pretty intense therapy (curiously with no real prompting in that direction from the therapist), and then, in group therapy, I had a sense that one of my fellows had a "dark energy" (apologies for the loose language) around him, and so I asked him about it and if it was a demon, and he said yes how did you know, and in the middle of group therapy we had like a very frank conversation about the demon he felt like had been possessing him and how we could both see or sense them in other people. I tried to dissuade him from "leaning into" the demonic energy further, as I had done, but, like this article describes, it seemed part of him enjoyed the demonic power.
That said, at least in my experience thinking of them as malevolent entities is itself not very helpful. That kind of thinking pits you against yourself, and (if you'll allow some playful paranoia) is also just what a demon might want you think. This little bit of Confucius' analects, I have found helpful:
Fan Ch'ih asked what constituted wisdom. The Master said, "To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom." (Analects 6.22a)
So I think that's the right disposition: just keep going and doing the normal stuff that you already know is good, working your way up to address the bigger problem, and don't fall into the trap of freaking out about demons too much.
Anyway, thanks for the great article!
Ive been in therapy for many years. Currently with a Jungian and I love it. I find that a lot of modalities in therapy now need to be seen as “exploratory” more than anything. It just seems like there isn’t a lot of data to other than anecdotal to support a lot of these newer treatments! I still think people new to therapy should largely seek out CBT / DBT oriented therapists!
I'm surprised you didn't mention Kevin Simler's ideas in this context e.g. "Neurons Gone Wild".
> what's common to all of these phenomena is that they seem to involve separate entities — agents who aren't wholly 'us' — living inside our brains. God knows, they may even be sentient. There's certainly nothing in principle that would prevent a brain from hosting two separate sentient creatures. And while I can't say for sure that it's true, the mere possibility of it should give us pause.
> I suggest we try to be charitable and give the exorcists some credit. When they say they're casting out demons or evil spirits, what if we understood that to mean that they're casting out brain-agents?
> In fact we can say this: Exorcism is a form of psychological therapy in which the disease is treated as an agent.
> In other words, an exorcist is a healer who takes the intentional stance toward a person's inner demons. Instead of looking for a medicinal cure (physical stance), and instead of addressing the patient's 'self' (psychological stance), the exorcist addresses the patient's ailment directly. This could entail any number of things: negotiating with it, reasoning with it, bribing it, showing it love and compassion, making it swear an oath, threatening it, or commanding it in the name of a higher power.
Your joke about normal family therapy was funny and is probably what these people need and while the Catholic Church has widely written about this and has analysis like Faulkners done before doing a real exorcism it honestly looks like he's remaking archetypes, anima/animus, replacing the usage of family systems as in familial dynamics and that fucker is going to make a killing off people and can I posit maybe send the gender gnostic that got too far into their feminine or masculine side to them as well, like no whatever your identifying as today, it's your hatred of your mother for not proving you as if it's her fault somehow with strong male leadership. The possibilities for "Bob" to make money off " exercising the demonzzzz" and all that is endless especially if the patient has no theological background and the right insurance plan amirite. I think it's shit just like BPD is shit and an invented diagnosis and the new hypercritical on women diagnosis du juor that brought us things like, mommy's little helpers, Prozac and Valium and later whatever else they could get the 3rd Gen western medicine believer to pop in their mouth from their script pad. Why would Bob even want to talk to demons and why wouldn't he call a priest and not mess with entities he has no idea about?
This sounds like a dubious technique for therapy, but maybe a great way for fiction writers to come up with ideas. I am totes serious when I say somebody should start an IFS writer's workshop.
> There's certainly nothing in principle that would prevent a brain from hosting two separate sentient creatures. And while I can't say for sure that it's true, the mere possibility of it should give us pause.
I believe there are at least 2 separate sentient creatures in us, because there is one "me" who remembers a dream, and at least 1 other intelligent "me" who has sometimes arranged some details of the dream in a logical way which I don't realize until I'm well into it. Also, the subconscious part of me that notifies me of things, e.g., now is a good time to use a bathroom, has already done some reasoning that would be intimidating to an AI, like figuring out which buildings I'm driving past are likely to have public restrooms and whether they're likely to be open based on time of day, lights on or off, people inside or not. I believe that the verbalizing "me" didn't do this inference, because it is informed that now is a good time to use this handy restroom not cognitively, but by a sudden sensation of needing to pee urgently. Somebody else did the reasoning and then passed that notification on not to my brain, but to my bladder, suggesting they aren't well-integrated with my conscious mind.
Why is that subconscious activity “somebody else”.
A reasonable question. The word "subconscious" implies it is /not/ "sombeody else". But we've always assumed the subconscious is id-like, enacting an insect-like program that tells us to get closer to things it likes, and farther away from things it doesn't like. If it's making calculations like "this restaurant is likely to be open because it has a bar that serves liquor that is probably open late", that doesn't seem id-like. If consciousness is an inevitable by-product of running a program that has goals, builds a model of the environment, continually scans sensors to update that model, calculates the relevance of those updates to its goals, and formulates and executes a plan if an opportunity for optimization arises, then the thing doing that is conscious. If I believed that consciousness /isn't/ an inevitable by-product of running such a program, I would be a mystic or vitalist.
Check out Monsignor Rossetti's "Diary of an Exorcist" for an easy, interesting read on this topic. He has a PhD in Psych and served in the Air Force, then became a priest and trained as an exorcist. He explains that possession is rare but does exist, which corroborates Falconer. A person must receive a psych evaluation/treatment to rule out other conditions before he/she can be referred to an exorcist. We are all tempted, but there are different, stronger levels of activity from evil spirits; obsession, oppression, and possession. If a person participates in occult activities or engages with demons, it can lead to these, because it is like one is consenting to interact with the demons. Falconer feels he kept getting possessed-could be that in treating the patients he keeps engaging with the demons in a chatty way that is not telling them to leave but kind of suggesting it, and it opens him to the danger.
This reminds of Daniel Dennet's intentional stance: imagining something you want to understand as an agent.
I'm also reminded of a joke: someone sees the village skeptic wearing a shoe horse as a lucky charm and asks 'Have you started to believe?'; the skeptic replies:'I heard it works even if you don't believe.'
I wonder how much suspension of disbelief is necessary for IFS to help.
Do medications that work really have placebo effects stronger than the chemical effects? I've heard this before about antidepressants, but when I looked into it, I found that the drug vs placebo difference was substantially larger than the placebo vs nothing difference. I show what I found in my recent LessWrong post, "Why I don't believe in the placebo effect". The title is because I don't believe in a "real" placebo effect on the disease, and interpret the placebo vs nothing difference as biased reporting or maybe some subtle statistical issue, but even if you interpret it as a real improvement, it's not bigger than the chemical effect.
Ugh. I'm so tired of this topic. I'm a therapist, I use IFS and psychoanalysis. (they are a great marriage, because IFS has a blind spot a size of Antarctica about therapeutic relationships, relationships in general, and about the very simple thing that not all unpleasant experience is caused by some past trauma. sometimes you really are in a shitty place in life, sometimes people around you are really jerks, etc). I also have a pretty good biology background thanks to my high school teacher. I'm not officially IFS trained, I took a non-IFSI-endorsed training, and I've been working for 2,5 years only so my experience is limited, and maybe I just haven't seen real shit yet.
And I have a very simple explanation about parts that usually are interpreted as UB. It is - ta-damm! - a form of auto-aggression, a thing that has been well-studied in mammals including humans since like.. 60x? I'm not sure, but when I was a teen, Konrad Lorenz already was old school. Auto-aggression in children is easier to recognise because it's usually a pretty obvious physical act. But society marks it as a stupid, irrational or crazy thing to do, which leads to it becoming internal, non-noticeable by people around because they will for sure add insult to injury. Just like many undiagnosed autists develop un-noticeable ways of stimming.
I have a lot of patients with cPTSD, and the best IFS intervention I came up with to deal with cruel parts who say things like 'I torment you because fuck you all', is to simply ask these parts, who they are really so angry with. And suggest not to change their behavior, but to redirect their anger back to those responsible. I won't claim it works miraculously, no, we people easily fall to the old patterns because growing new neural connections takes time, and old ones won't disappear magically, they also need time to deteriorate after new ones have been developed.
But it works much better than reasoning with them and trying to persuade a client that things these parts saying aren't true. because, you know, when you have an inner radio constantly one with looped message 'you're a useless shit', it's really hard not to succumb to it.
And I tend to think therapists very often become pushing clients to give them answers, not accepting 'I don't know', or 'I'm not sure'. And I very much suspect most of these 'yes I'm a demon' replies are a result of therapists pushing for the answer they want to get and clients (unconsciously) giving up.