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Ecopsychology: The Transformative Power of HomeRyan A. Mest a a
Psychology Department, Duquesne University,
To cite this Article Mest, Ryan A.(2008) 'Ecopsychology: The
Transformative Power of Home', The Humanistic
Psychologist, 36: 1, 52 71 To link to this Article: DOI:
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The Humanistic Psychologist, 36:5271, 2008 Copyright Taylor
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Ecopsychology:The Transformative Power of Home Ryan A.
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Psychology Department Duquesne University
In this article, I approach the meaning of ecopsychology in an
attempt to broaden it to include clinical practice. I begin by
articulating the history of the word ecopsychology. The
etymological understanding of the word suggests the home to be the
defining interest of ecopsychology, which includes the Earth, in
addition to other meanings of home. I then review The Spell of the
Sensuous by David Abram (1996) alongside classic texts from
phenomenology to reveal the profound participatory and formative
experience of the home. Finally, I offer my own work on the middle
voice to articulate the home as a place of transformation with a
sensitivity to both language and the body. Throughout the article,
I offer my own experience, a sophisticated approach to language, an
appreciation of phenomenology, and philosophical depth of writing
to open doors for ecopsychology beyond the classroom and the
workshop retreat.
The ancient Greek word oikos speaks to ecopsychologists today,
although the meaning it offers might fall on deaf ears. Or
perhapsbecause it is, after all, a written word and does not
literally speakwe might say it falls on deaf eyes. Liddell and
Scott (1889/1995) defined oikos as a house, abode, or dwelling; a
room, chamber, or part of a house; the house of a god or a temple;
and ones household, family, household goods, and substance. How
well this word offers the depth of meaning that the word home today
also offers us! Home means so much more than simply a literal
house, just as oikos means not just house but also family, a part
of a house, temple, and dwelling. The word home reminds me of the
place from which Ive come, the place where I find myself as I have
been and will be and indeed am. Home holds my comforts, my
struggles, my cares, and my longings. Perhaps, more than anything
else, home reminds me, as I write, of the relationships that I bear
everyday and constitute my experience of the world.
Correspondence should be addressed to Ryan Mest, Psychology
Department, Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA
15282. E-mail: [email protected]
ECOPSYCHOLOGY: THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF HOME
53
The prefix eco emerged in English from oikos. The word
ecopsychology offers readers and listeners its etymological
history. According to this history, ecopsychology offers so much
more than an appreciation and respect for mans relationship to
Nature, Mother Earth, or the Environment. Ecopsychology offers a
psychology concerned more broadly with a concrete psychology of the
home. I find myself, on the one hand, appreciative of what
ecopsychology has to offer psychologists, students, and workshop
participants. How well ecopsychology has articulated our profound
participation in our perception and experience of the Earth and
vice versa! On the other hand, I find myself wanting to address my
clients experiences of their homes in a spirit of ecopsychology,
but feel uncomfortable doing so. Its a shame that before me I find
texts that offer profound psychological insights and theoretical
tools for nurturing a therapeutic articulation of the home, but,
because not everyone thinks of their home as Mother Earth, these
insights and tools needlessly limit themselves to environmentalist
interventions. Perhaps ecopsychology may emerge with everyday
clinical relevance by spreading its arms and embracing the home the
way it has embraced the Earth. Perhaps then, ecopsychologists might
no longer find themselves confined in their practice to workshops
and retreats. The home often appears in psychotherapy as a natural
part of the client or patients narrative. Reflection often revolves
around the meanings of and responses to the question Where (in what
way, or how) do you find yourself? To find oneself in any way or
state of being often involves a story of how one arrived at this
place. A story of where one has come from appears. This story is
often about what the client or patient considers home. Narratives
in psychotherapy often revolve around a place considered home.
Particular relationships discussed again and again appear in a
particular scene. Perhaps these particular relationships have a
home in this scene. Home also appears as a destination constantly
headed towards or returned to. At both a theoretical and concrete
level, people feel at home in certain words and styles of speaking.
Home is not simply a place. A reason to stay with the client or
patients own language in psychotherapy is that their language has a
history that bears their experience and the history of this
experience. The client or patients own language may be a living
artifact from their past and entwined with their experience of
home. People speak so differently in different places and with
different people! All homes have a particular way of speaking.
Language is a part of every home and people dwell in the language
just as they dwell in the home. How differently we sometimes speak
when we feel at home! Similarly, the way a person carries
themselves physically often changes in relation to different places
and with different people. How we find ourselves in our bodies and
as our bodies in the world and with other people depends so much on
how we feel, where we are, and who were with! The home includes
particular gestures that inhabit the bodies of the people who also
make up the home. After a long
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day of work, I might get home, pour myself some whiskey, and lay
myself in my chair for a while. How differently I find myself in my
body then, compared to how I was at work! The Earth appears in
ecopsychology as the home of all humans, creatures, plants, and
places we encounter. Ecopsychology concerns itself with how human
beings dwell in this home that we all share. Inherent to the
dwelling of human beings in the Earth as their home is an
experience of and in both their bodies and their language. One
cannot properly address the relationship between human beings and
the Earth without a sensitivity to the language about the Earth and
the sensing body in relation to the Earth. David Abram (1996) has
recently offered ecopsychology an appreciation for the role
language plays in constituting our experiences of nature. Indeed,
he offers, more broadly, an appreciation of language as
constitutive of our meaningful experience in the world. In his
book, The Spell of the Sensuous, he describes the changes in our
cultures experience of language in relation to our cultures
experience of the world and people. He discovers for ecopsychology
that how we are at home in our language as a culture is profoundly
related to and constitutive of how we find ourselves in relation to
the Earth, our most shared home. His discovery may focus on our
relationship to the Earth but one may easily experience this
discovery as relevant to wherever we may find ourselves that is,
whatever we may experience our home to be, be it Earth, university,
city, country, family, or friends, etc. What does Abram (1996)
discover and offer us? He pays close attention to the experience of
the world common in oral cultures and compares them to experiences
of the world in literate cultures such as ours. He finds that
reading and writing privilege a particular kind of experience.
Literate cultures with a phonetic alphabet, such as ours, cultivate
particular modes of engagement and particular sensibilities. Abram
tells us about these particularities,Phonetic reading, of course,
makes use of a particular sensory conjunctionthat between seeing
and hearing. And indeed, among the various synaesthesias that are
common to the human body, the confluence (or chiasm) between seeing
and hearing is particularly acute. For vision and hearing are the
two distance senses of the human organism. In contrast to touch and
proprioception (inner-body sensations), and unlike the chemical
senses of taste and smell, seeing and hearing regularly place us in
contact with things and events unfolding at a substantial distance
from our own visible, audible body. (Abram, 1996, p. 128)
Reading privileges an experience of the world at a distance.
Take a moment to consider the world you find yourself in now, dear
reader. I hear the hum of my computer. I see the light on my desk
and follow the intricate sculpting of the wood base all the way up
to the blinding light bulb. I hear my dog behind me licking her
paws.
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The things I see and hear appear from beyond my immediate reach.
My other senses offer a closeness that seeing and hearing do not. I
feel my fingers typing on the keyboard, whose keys hold the warmth
of my fingers, inviting them to return and dance from one key to
another. I taste my own hot breath stagnating in my mouth above my
tongue, which itself floats on a warm puddle of saliva. (No wonder
the dentist says brush three times a day!) Touching and tasting
offer a sense of my body and a closeness to things. A part of
reading, which Abram does not address, is certainly a tactile
sensation. To cuddle up with a book does, indeed, privilege a sense
of closeness. Despite this closeness, Abrams point still rings true
at an intuitive level. Phonetic reading supports a world that
appears at a distance by requiring a synaesthetic experience of
seeing and hearing. Our experience of language perhaps cultivates a
broader experience of the world at a distance. Pushing this point
further, reading might even train us to engage with the world in a
very particular way, rather than another way. Reading privileges
the seeing and hearing of some things and excludes others. Abram
(1996) suggests that, in contrast to oral cultures, literate
cultures ascribe the power of speech specifically and perhaps
exclusively to words. He writes,To read is to enter into a profound
participation, or chiasm, with the inked marks upon the page. In
learning to read we must break the spontaneous participation of our
eyes and our ears in the surrounding terrain (where they had
ceaselessly converged in the synaesthetic encounter with animals,
plants, and streams) in order to recouple those senses upon the
flat surface of the page. As a Zuni elder focuses her eyes upon a
cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes
upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear
spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience
other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even inanimate rivers
once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the inert letters on the
page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for
granted, but it is animism nonethelessas mysterious as a talking
stone. (Abram, 1996, pg. 131)
In light of this passage, the Zuni elder who articulates an
experience of hearing a cactus speak has much in common with you,
dear reader! What a peculiar thing reading is as a cultural
phenomenon. Literate people hear the written word in their
imaginations and yet find hearing a stone speak to be indicative of
madness. As a literate culture, we are at home in a world of
speaking words and mute things perhaps also a mute Earth. Following
Abrams (1996) argument further, phonetic cultures also dictate
specifically what the words might say. Not only do words have the
privilege to speak, whereas most things do not, words also may only
say particular things. Phonetic alphabets, such as ours, require
words to be heard and pronounced in prescriptive ways. According to
the teaching of the phonetic alphabet, there is little room for
interpretation of the sound of a word. Before the Greek alphabet,
words could be
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pronounced in a variety of ways. There were no vowels in the
alphabet before. According to Abram, the introduction of the Greek
alphabet fundamentally changed the literate persons experience of
language and the world. He describes the change in the character of
the written text with the introduction of the Greek alphabet, which
for Abrams purposes may be the same as our English alphabet,A text
written with the new alphabet had none of the ambiguity that, as we
have seen, was inherent in a traditional Hebrew text. While for any
Hebrew text of sufficient length there were various possible
pronunciations, or readings, each of which would yield a slightly
different set of words and meanings, a comparable Greek text would
likely admit of only a single correct reading. It is thus that
texts written with the Greek (and later the Roman) alphabet did not
invite the kind of active and everrenewed interpretation that was
demanded by the Hebrew texts. The interactive, synaesthetic
participation involved in readingin transforming a series of
visible marks into a sequence of soundscould now become entirely
habitual and automatic. For there was no longer any choice in how
to sound out the text; all the cues for ones participation were
spelled out upon the page. Relative to Semitic texts, then, the
Greek texts had a remarkable autonomythey seemed to stand, and even
to speak, on their own. (Abram, 1996, pp. 251252)
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Imagine, dear reader, that the words on the page before you
could sound a variety of ways. Imagine the artistry involved in
reading a text that would sound to you so differently than it might
to me, or to any other reader. To participate in the sound of the
word would make of the reader an artist, concretely and spiritually
involved with the written text, like a child running through the
woods and his imagination at the same time. How stark is the
contrast between the reader as artist and the reader of a phonetic
text? The words you see before you instruct your hearing. They
appear as a kind of program that you process like a machine. You
are not intimately entwined with the sound of the text. Your
imagination has little place in the sounding of the word, though
you might hear it uttered by a particular voice or with a
particular intonation. Dont you find yourself radically separate
from the sound of the written words in your imagination? I wonder,
along with Abram, how deeply entrenched this mechanical experience
of the word is in our culture as a principle by which we engage not
only the written word but also the world. Do we engage the world as
if it were written phonetically? Perhaps to read the written word
is also to constitute our experience of the world as a written
world. Is this the world were at home in? The phrase a written
world bears a particular character of relationship between person
and world. To read the written world may be to perceive things and
people as instructing us to experience a specific meaning in our
minds, imaginations, or inner selves. The relationship between the
written world and those readers who inhabit it is a relationship
between an external stimulus and an internal response. Perhaps
learning to read according to strict rules is also to learn that we
are
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57
radically separate from the world and others. How mechanistic
this world is! How devoid of intimacy it is! Abram (1996)
writes,Today the speaking self looks out at a purely exterior
nature from a purely interior zone, presumably located somewhere
inside the physical body or brain. Within alphabetic civilization,
virtually every human psyche construes itself as just such an
individual interior, a private mind or consciousness unrelated to
the other minds that surround it, or to the environing earth. For
there is no longer any common medium, no reciprocity, no
respiration between the inside and the outside. There is no longer
any flow between the self-reflexive domain of alphabetized
awareness and all that exceeds, or subtends, this determinate
realm. Between consciousness and the unconscious. Between
civilization and the wilderness. (p. 257)
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To summarize Abrams argument, reading requires a peculiar
relationship between an external instruction and an internal
experience. Where has participation and intimacy with the world
gone? Can we truly be at home when experiencing such profound
separation? What has happened, and indeed is happening, to the
world of the children and the artists who experience the world as
also themselves? It strikes me as more than coincidence that an
objective world described as separate from an internal, subjective
experience resembles so closely the relationship between reader and
text. How striking that our experience of language may develop
alongside our experience of the world and ourselves. By
articulating the very lack of intimacy between reader and written
word or written world, a profound intimacy between language and the
world appears! Language and world, language and Earth, language and
home appear entwined. Despite the profound experience of separation
they reveal, they, themselves, appear inseparable. In Abrams (1996)
work, we see the development of literacy emerge alongside the
development of the objective or written world. Literacy seems
entwined with our physical senses, as well as our general
psychological experience. Our phonetic literacy has some profound
relationship to our experience of the world as objective and of
ourselves and others as having a wholly separate, internal sphere
of experience. Abrams discovery for ecopsychology reminds me of a
discovery within developmental psychology. Just as Abram
articulates the relationship between language and psychological
experience of the world and others, so, too, does another
psychologist articulate a similar relationship between posture and
psychological experience. Just as Abram finds phonetic language
appearing alongside a world of distance and separation, so too does
this other psychologist find the upright posture appearing
alongside a world of distance and separation of internal and
external and of subject and objective world. Psychologist Erwin
Straus (1980) demonstrates that how we find ourselves at home in
our own bodies relates to the psychological development of the
human being and his or her experience of the surrounding world. He
approaches develop-
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ment with both a phenomenological and etymological sensitivity.
Although he lives in a literate culture, he still listens to words
speak without hearing only a programmatic meaning. In stark
contrast to an approach to language as purely representational, he
approaches language with a poetic appreciation for the life and
history of words. I find his writing style moving from concrete
observations about the human body to concrete observation about
language. He notices the development of words as he also notices
the intricacies and structure of the developing human body. Indeed,
he tells us in the beginning of his paper: We can read mans natural
endowment from his physique (Straus, 1980, pg. 142). For Dr.
Straus, it seems that reading the body enables his thought. He
doesnt fear the distinctly human intimacy between the meaning of
the physical body and the meaning of language. In a
footnotefootnote number 6 on page 145 of Phenomenological
Psychology he ventures to suggest (as I have here and many times
before) that metaphors tell us more than we might otherwise think.
He first writes, It is interesting to see how greatly language is
shaped in accordance with expressive phenomena. And then, after
sharing an etymological observation relevant to the word in the
paper that the footnote refers to, he ventures another bold and
remarkable point. He writes, metaphors do not simply carry over a
meaning from one medium to another. There is a much more intimate
relationthat between expressive motion and emotional attitude. What
a declaration of method he pronounces! How strange that these lines
lie hidden in the small print at the bottom of a page! In a funny
sort of way, a footnote may be the best place for these lines to be
written. For our feet connect us to the ground that supports us.
Our feet hold us up and root us in the ground that keeps us from
falling. In short, our feet support and carry us just as a method
of inquiry carries our writing. I hope you expect my conclusion,
which would indicate that youve genuinely understood my joke, that
according to Straus meaning its appropriate that his methodological
insight appear in a footnote. Now, reader, you might wonder what
Straus (1980) means by metaphors do not simply carry a meaning from
one medium to another. There is a much more intimate relationthat
between expressive motion and emotional attitude (p. 145). And why
have I pointed to these lines as a disclosure of his method? Let us
sit with these questions. Let us offer them a bit of patience and
return to them in due time. Let us follow Straus psychological
development of the human being in terms of posture, and I venture
that these questions will be answered by the style with which he
writes. As we might read a philosophical work, we may read his
style or method as both the mode of inquiry into the subject matter
and the object of this inquiry as well. We may follow his
articulation of the development of the upright posture and notice
that the very style of this articulation appears also as a
meaningful offering to ecopsychology and psychology in general.
What a wondrous accomplishment standing is! The upright posture
distinguishes the maturing child from the infant. This posture,
which has the erect spine as its essential feature, also
distinguishes human from ape. One must only
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59
recall the famous picture of a line of evolving primates. First,
one sees a small slouched monkey, then in front of him is a
slightly larger one, then in front of him a taller-standing though
slouching ape, and finally a man with back straight walking as if
about to walk off the page. Our very evolution is read as a
development of the upright posture. Straus (1980) asks himself an
important question for psychology. He seems to ask, What does the
upright posture reveal about the character of the human being? How
may we read the upright posture as mans nature? Reader, when you
stand, what sort of activity do you engage in? What is the
character of this activity? What does standing make possible? How
does standing change your relationship to your environment, to your
fellow human beings, and to the Earth? How might you experience
your home without standing or walking? How different your home
would become! Suddenly, all that seemed within reach is so far. And
yet, those things which were so far, such as the floor, the
underneath of tables, and the legs of chairs are so close. You can
feel and smell the floor and things so close to you. You have a
home that is both closer to and further from you. Whenever I lie or
sit low on the floor, my dog approaches me differently. Our
relationship to each other has changed. We smell each other. She
lies lower than I do, showing her respect. We rub up next to each
other, feeling the warmth and texture of each other. How
differently I experience both the world and a living creature by
not standing! As a child, what might you have experienced in
learning to stand? Imagine being a young, crawling child. The
indoor environment is certainly different from a low perspective.
You must have, at some time and for whatever reason, had the
courage to push yourself up on your knees or bottom. In this
moment, your arms were used like legs at first. They held you up.
But sitting, the arms hung by your side free for some other
purpose, perhaps for chewing on or clapping. The next step towards
standing required much more courage from you. How many joints must
have been controlled (and still are!) to maintain balance in the
face of gravity. Indeed, you were and are in a battle with the
gravitational pull of the Earth itself. You struggle to find
balance in the difficult relationship of your own mass to the great
mass of the planet on which you would like to stand. In some way,
today when we stand we still engage in this struggle. Straus (1980)
reads in the childs effort to stand something characteristic of
human beings in general. He writes,Upright posture, which we learn
in and through falling, remains threatened by falls throughout our
lives. The natural stance of man is, therefore, resistance. A rock
reposes in its own weight. The things that surround us appear solid
and safe in their quiet resting on the ground, but mans status
demands endeavor. It is essentially restless. We are committed to
an ever renewed exertion. Our task is not finished with getting up
and standing. We have to withstand. He who is able to accomplish
this is called constant, stable. (p. 143)
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How revealing these words are! Straus (1980) articulates the
character of humanity as strong, resistant, and even ambitious, in
that to simply be in our upright posture is a never-ending
endeavor. Straus goes on to read this characterthe very character
that hes just read on the human bodyin the etymology of the word,
stand. Here we find his method particularly useful as psychologists
and perhaps philosophical readers. Language, itself, bears the
character of man that our bodies also bear. Even more precisely,
for that last sentence was a general point, the word stand bears
the character that the act of standing upright also bears in
bearing the weight of the body. Immediately following the lines I
just quoted, Straus (1980) writes,Language expresses well the
psychological meaning of standing, with all its facets. The
coupling of the transitive and the intransitive meanings to stand
and to stand something characterizes them as resisting and,
therefore, enduring against threat, danger, and attack. The
etymological root of standingstais one of the most prolific
elements not only in English but also Greek, Latin, French, and
German. It may suffice to mention only a few derivatives of an
almost inexhaustible store. Besides such combinations as standing
for, standing by, and making a stand, there are many words where
the root has undergone slight changes but is still recognizable:
e.g., state, status, estate, statement, standard, statute,
institution, constitution, substance, establish, understand,
assist, distant. This entire family of words is kept together by
one and the same principal meaning. They refer to something that is
instituted, erected, constructed, and, in its dangerous
equilibrium, threatened by fall and collapse. (p. 143)
Its interesting how pleasure also appears in relation to
standing. How tiring standing and enduring the pull of the Earth
can be! In standing, we find ourselves at odds with the Earth. We
struggle for balance. The tension inherent to this relationship
appears as the condition for relief. The flip side of our standing
relationship to the Earth is the enjoyment that ceasing to stand
brings. The Earth may be the source of our struggle to stand
upright, but the Earth also cradles us when were willing to fall.
Straus (1980) points out this enjoyment and captures it in the
intriguing psychological images of sex and addiction,Because
getting up and standing are so demanding, we enjoy resting,
relaxing, yielding, lying down, and sinking back. There is the
voluptuous gratification of succumbing. Sex remains a form of lying
down or, as language says, lying or sleeping with. Addicts, in
their experience, behavior, and intention, reveal the double aspect
of sinking back and its contrast to being upright. A symposium
found the ancient Greeks, a convivium the Romans, stretched on
their couches until, after many libations to Dionysus and Bacchus,
they finally sank to the ground. (p. 144)
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It makes common sense that our struggle with the gravity of the
Earth should construct our experience of enjoyment. Success in this
struggle is not the end of our relationship to the Earth, but, in
fact, is the beginning of a developing relationship that constructs
not only our enjoyment, but our relationship to the world in
general. And also our experience of home! The enjoyment of lying
down, sitting, and especially sleeping occur in the home. Often, a
persons home may be identified as the place where they find rest
and lay their head. The upright posture constructs our experience
of home by both our struggle to remain upright and our enjoyment of
ceasing to be upright. Reader, imagine again what the world of a
crawling child is like. Or perhaps imagine how different the world
of a person with paralyzed legs must be. This persons experience is
not lessened. But their relationship to things around them is
different than the experience of walking people. Their perspective
is different: Things are seen from the vantagepoint of sitting,
even while moving. The length of their reach is significantly
shorter without their legs to step toward things with. Imagine the
difficulty stairs pose. Imagine how difficult high shelves and
cabinets must be. Wonder at how ones personal space changes when
the wheelchair becomes the carrier of your body. Wonder also at the
rootedness one might feel, sitting always and finding balance
securely in the face of the Earth. Imagine how the experience of
home might be. Imagine the difficulty one might experience getting
out of the wheel chair to get into bed or into the tub. These are
different experiences of our struggle with the pull of the Earth.
As children, we experienced something of these difficulties in
learning to stand. Rising upright changes our perspective. The
heights of the world appear within our grasp. Things on shelves or
high tables suddenly appear before our eyes. On the other hand,
suddenly were unstable. We might fall at any turn. The comfort and
security of our quadruped existence has been left behind. In a way,
moving becomes easier and less cumbersome, for by walking we really
control and direct ourselves as we fall. We master the pull of the
Earth by our motions. But at what cost might we gain such a
powerful mastery? In mastering the Earth, dont we also distance
ourselves in some way? Straus (1980) points to three consequences
born from our upright posture. The first well turn to is the
distance from things. Straus writes,Distance from things. In
upright posture, the immediate contact with things is loosened. A
child creeping on his hands and knees not only keeps contact with
the ground but is, in his all-fours locomotion, like the
quadrupeds, directed toward immediate contact with things. The
length-axis of his body coincides with the direction of his motion.
With getting up, all this changes. In walking, man moves his body
in a parallel transposition, the length-axis of his body at a right
angle to the direction of his motion. He finds himself always
confronted with things. Such remoteness enables him to see things,
detached from the immediate contact of grasping and incorporating,
in their relation to one another. Seeing is transformed into
looking at. The hori-
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zon is widened, removed; the distant becomes momentous, of great
import. In the same measure, contact with near things is lost. (p.
144)
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The perspective of a standing and walking person distinguishes
itself as a vantagepoint. Like a person atop a mountain looking out
at the trees, patchwork fields, and the horizon, the walking person
surveys the expanse of space around him. We can see much farther
and even see an above-us and a below-us. Everything is at a
distance, either great or small. Just as Abram (1996) found
literacy privileging our distance senses (sight and hearing), so
too has Straus (1980) found the upright posture privileging these
very same senses in a similar way. Were uniquely removed from the
environment we inhabit as we walk through it. Were so remote that
we may walk in one direction while looking in another. Our eyes,
being in our head, freely move left and right, up and down. The
nearness of things has drifted into the expanse of space beyond us.
Overcoming dependence on things around us for support, we also lose
a symbiotic closeness with our environment. Its not that this
symbiosis is lost, exactly. Rather, its become more refined and
less obvious to our senses. Corresponding to this shift, Straus
draws on the different language used to describe upright
experience. When upright, everything is looked at and we confront
things. These words manifest the physical distance of our
experience of things, including things in our homes. Similarly, we
encounter other people at a distance. Standing straight up, we must
constantly resist falling into each other. Touching becomes a
conscious, rather than necessary, act of relating. In the act of
hugging, grappling, and even shaking hands, we risk our secure,
standing position. Standing upright, we must risk our balance to
explore another persons texture or their scent (unless, of course,
they stink or wear too much perfume). Our sense of sight and
hearing those senses suited for distancebecome the privileged
mediums of contact with others while our senses that require
closeness, namely touching, tasting, and smelling, become devalued
and less appreciated. Straus (1980) stresses both the physical
character of our relationship to each other as we stand upright as
well as the language that captures the same character of this
physical relationship and the gestures it enables. He
writes,Distance from fellow-men. In upright posture, we find
ourselves face to face with others, distant, aloofverticals that
never meet. On the horizontal plane, parallel lines converge toward
a vanishing point. Theoretically, the vanishing point of parallel
verticalsto which we are comparable, standing vis--visis in
infinite distance. In the finiteness of seeing, however, parallel
verticals do not meet. Therefore, the strict upright posture
expresses austerity, inaccessibility, decisiveness, domination,
majesty, mercilessness, or unapproachable remoteness, as in
catatonic symmetry. Inclination first brings us closer to another.
Inclination, just like leaning, means literally bending out from
the austere vertical. (p. 145)
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How separately we exist when we stand and walk. To be upright is
to be free, but also to be individual. Independence comes at the
cost of a certain necessary investment in and dependence on the
community of people and things around you. The return to this
dependence occurs often in the home. Isnt the bed the place where
intimacy appears? Arent we the most at home with the ones we rest
with or sleep beside? To stand truly is majestic and austere. To
lie down with someone is humbling. To be upright is to unify ones
body and claim independence from other people. To lie next to
someone is to admit vulnerability. To be upright is to master ones
environment. To be upright is to necessarily be faced with choices.
To lie down is to necessarily make yourself at home exactly where
youre at, whether youre comfortable or not. To stand upright with
head high appears as the emblem of democracy. Its a curious
coincidence that the upright posture erects the spine so as to make
it appear like the word I. A person achieves by his or her
uprightness a peculiar unity that defines us without reference to
our environment except for the pull of the Earth, but even that we
so quickly forget. We become a body that needs only itself to do
what we wish. Straus (1980) goes so far as to claim that the
upright posture is mastered by the child at the same time that the
word I appears in the childs vocabulary and in turn is mastered as
well:Distance from the ground. In getting up, we gain the freedom
of motion and enjoy it, but, at the same time, we lose secure
contact with the supporting ground, with Mother Earth, and we miss
it. We stand alone and have to rely on our own strength and
capacities. With the acquisition of upright posture, a
characteristic change in language occurs. In the early years, when
speaking of himself, a child uses his given name. However, when he
has reached the age when he can stand firmly on his own feet, he
begins to use the pronoun I for himself. This change marks a first
gaining of independence. Among all words, I is a most general word.
At the same time, it has a unique meaning for every speaker. In
using the word I, I oppose myself to everyone else, who,
nevertheless, is my fellow-man. (p. 144)
How remarkable a correlation! I hope the connection between our
bodies and our words strikes you. I hope that you clearly see what
Straus (1980) meant in that footnote which reads: metaphors do not
simply carry over a meaning from one medium to another. There is a
much more intimate relationthat between expressive motion and
emotional attitude (p. 145). Our bodies develop alongside our
developing language. Straus articulates the development of the
upright posture and its consequences in such a clear way that he
appeals to common sense. And yet, as I often find with common
sense, the words bear a depth of insight that doesnt simply carry
over into our experience of language. I appreciate Straus style. He
subtly concerns himself with a radical understanding of the body
one that bears witness to the body and language as well. Language
develops not simply like a body. It de-
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velops as a body and alongside the body. Bodies of language
always bear our experience. Our language changes as our bodies
change, for both body and language bear the weight of our
experience of the world. Alongside Straus, we have dwelled in
language with an etymological spirit. Words have a history of their
own, which endures through time. The written world we found with
Abram (1996) appears radically different! That world is the world
of Websters Dictionary, in which every word has a clearly defined
meaning without any appreciation or respect for the development of
that meaning or its roots. In Websters Dictionary, words have no
life. They represent a defined meaning or object. Oh dear,
misguided Webster! Words are not simply representative signs! Words
evolve and change with their use. Words bear poetic meanings as
well as representational ones. Writers and speakers participate in
the developing life and meanings of words. The Oxford English
Dictionary does not simply define words. It considers the old and
ancient words from which each word comes. It offers the
etymological history of the words. For every definition, it offers
references, usually from widely read works, to sentences in which
the word appears bearing the particular meaning the definition also
bears. The meanings of words are continually evolving as we use
them in different ways. These meanings are not already determined.
Rather, we are constantly participating in their unfolding meanings
through time. To approach language like Webster is to distance
ourselves from words as concrete things whose history and meanings
we participate in as writers, readers, and speakers. How peculiar
that learning to stand upright and walk affects our experience of
the world in the same sort of way that learning to read and write
affects our experience of the world. How might we make sense of the
parallel roles the body and language play in constituting our
experience of and participation in the world, and in particular our
homes? How might we articulate the relationship between what we
call home and our bodies and our language? I must admit that before
writing this article, I had felt comfortable with my response to
this very question. A truth appeared to me some years ago: In our
world, there are bodies of language. Has it ever struck you that
when someone speaks of a body of language or body of written work
that they might mean more than anyone knows? Like a symptom, the
phrase body of language bears so much meaning that the speaker of
the phrase seems to demonstrate and be ignorant of at the same
time. We find ourselves developing as speakers just as we find
ourselves developing as physical bodies. Just as our bodies are the
medium of our sensations, so too is our language a medium of our
feelings. As human beings, our bodies and our words bear our
experience. We carry our experience in our bodies and in our words
wherever we go. Indeed, we even speak of books developing as we
speak of bodies maturing. A book, we commonly think, is a most
mature sort of writing or text. A mere page may have developed into
a paper that may have led to other papers and
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finally grew into a book like a child who became a full-fledged
man or woman. In the development of a human beingand in the
evolutionary development of the human as wellit is the spinal
column that structures, perhaps more than any other part, the
physical world of the adult, as we have witnessed in Straus (1980)
work. To stand upright, to sit up straight, to walk, and to run
changes radically the world of human experience. Our arms hang by
our sides. Our heads rest on our spines and survey the landscape
from the highest point of our bodies. We face those we speak to.
Our legs may stand, walk, and run. The hips, legs, arms, and head
fully affect every other appendage and body part because of the
spine that binds them together into an upright unity. And so we
also call that part of the book that binds its many parts together
into a single, mature being the spine of the book. As our
developmental and anatomical language describes human bodies, so it
also describes bodies of language. How similarly we experience
texts and bodies! This similarity strikes me as more than
appropriate perhaps excessively appropriate or appropriate beyond
metaphor. As both physical bodies and bodies of language, we
participate in the world that we perceive. In psychotherapy, I find
that reflecting on how the client finds himself or herself
participating in and constituting their experience of home offers
profound psychological and therapeutic insight. This participation
frequently takes the form of participation as either a body or as a
body of language. The words a person speaks at home and the
physical way a person interacts with the space of the home and the
people in the home constitute their perception of whats going on in
the home. The experience of what home is appears entwined with the
language and bodily experience in the home. A client or patient who
feels safe only when at home constitutes the home as safety as a
physical body. Similarly, the client or patient who curses
violently when at home constitutes the home as abusive as a body of
language. Ecopsychologists often reference the work of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1964/ 1968). He offers a philosophical articulation
of the human being as intimately participating in the existence of
the very world he or she exists in. In his well-known, though
unfinished and posthumous, essay The IntertwiningThe Chiasm, he
writesSince the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still
himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision.
And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also
undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I
feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally
passivitywhich is the second and more profound sense of the
narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the
contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the
outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced,
captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the
visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees
and which is seen. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, p. 139)
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With reference to vision, we find Merleau-Ponty asserting what
we have also found with Abram (1996) and Straus(1980): The world is
not entirely objective and separate from us. We are responsible for
the very world we find ourselves in, for each of us constitutes
this world by the way we dwell in it as our home. We participate in
the life of the Earth and the life of our homes. Around the time I
first read this passage from Merleau-Ponty, I had a revealing
personal experience at home. On Sunday morning, I often lie in bed.
Its the one day that both my girlfriend, Emily, and I have off from
work. This Sunday, like other Sundays, I found myself awake, lying
in bed, with Emily asleep on my chest, one of her legs thrown over
one of mine, and on my other side the dog, Pooter (Samantha
really), rested against my body from my knee up to my stomach where
she, not unlike Emily, also rested her head. I value moments like
these. Like a pack of pups, we become a mass of warmth that is also
a kind of family. What wonderful gestures make up this mass! To lie
on someone or to be lied on cannot help but bear a profound
intimacy. And what a soothing pleasure it is to feel the warm skin
of another feeling your own warm skin. In a moment such as this, a
thought appeared to me that has stayed with me: Merleau-Ponty was a
cuddler. How could one doubt such a thought! In the very moment
that I encountered this thought, I was convinced. Like men often
do, perhaps Merleau-Ponty protects what is most valuable for him.
For his philosophy fortifies the profound intimacy of the
experience of entwining in a lovers arms and sharing warmth with a
loyal dog. Reading Merleau-Ponty, his whole style seems to emanate
from the experience of touching, gesture, and the sharing of warmth
with the world and another. He seems so at home in the world he
describes. Like a cuddler, his philosophy bears a feeling that the
warmth of the world around me is both my body and the body of
others. The whole world appears as my intimate partner for whom I
feel deeply responsible and somehow inseparable from. There are
moments in life when we determine and reconstitute who we are and
how we experience the world. I believe that these moments often
happen in relation to the home. With Abram (1996) and Straus
(1980), we have found learning literacy and learning upright
posture to be important moments in the psychological development of
both the person and their world, especially their home. In ancient
Greek, there existed a grammatical structurea conjugation of
verbsthat indicated that one of these moments occurred in the
sentence. A verb in the middle voice indicated that the subject
performing the action was fundamentally reconstituted by this
action. Just as Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968) writes of the seer as
both actively and passively engaged with the world, the middle
voice indicates that the subject is both actively engaged and
passively affected at the same time. I first became intrigued by
the middle voice in a short passage from Jacques Lacans (1981;1997)
third seminar, when he references Benevenistes work on the
psychological importance of the middle voice. Since then, I have
written of its psychological and philosophical importance again and
again (Mest, 2002, 2003, 2005).
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For ecopsychology, the middle voice strikes me as particularly
relevant. Ecopsychologists concern themselves with moments and
experiences of transformation. The middle voice is the grammatical
structure that, by a simple conjugation of the verb, indicates the
transformation of the subject of the sentence. Unfortunately, there
is no such structure in English. However, we can still identify
sentences that bear the same active and passive, as well as
transformative character. In English, there are still sentences in
the spirit of the middle voice, despite the absence of the clear
grammatical structure. When one writes or speaks of a
transformative experience, they speak in the middle voice. In
English, not having a middle voice in our grammar, we perhaps
overlook the important role language plays in transformation. An
account a person shares in writing of a transformative experience
does not simply represent a transformative experience in language,
as Webster might have us believe. The very specific words chosen to
represent this experience go through a transformation as well. For
instance, a client of mine dated men and slept with men, but never
in her home. She started dating one man regularly and eventually he
spent the night at her place. Shortly after, he met her parents and
she met his and they began a committed relationship. When he spent
the night at her apartment, his place in her world transformed. In
therapy, she shared the experience of having him over saying
Jonathan spent the night at my place. Jonathan, both the person and
the actual namethat is, the word Jonathantransformed and took on a
different set of meanings in her narrative in psychotherapy, as
well as in her world. For the remainder of this session and through
our subsequent sessions, Jonathan both the name and the person
represented by this nameappeared very differently in her experience
than he had before. The phrase spent the night at my place might
have been written in the middle voice by the Greeks. The use of
this particular verb phrase by my particular client is very
powerful. In Abrams (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous, I have
identified many passages in which the action of a subject also
reconstitutes the subject and the subjects world. I will share some
examples from the book, but not all that I have found. These
examples reveal not only the experiences represented by the
sentences in the spirit of the middle voice; they also reveal the
specific words that bear the power of transformation for the reader
dwelling in Abrams carefully chosen words. In the following
example, Abram (1996) describes the effect literacy had on tribal
people taught by missionaries. To learn to read was an action that
reconstituted their experience of the world: The terrain and plant
life that spoke to them in their home became mute. As we found
earlier in this article, to learn to read is an action that Abram
strongly articulates as transformative. He shares both the
transformative experience represented by the words and his own
vocabulary of transformation. Abram writes of learning to read in
the middle voice,Christian missions and missionaries were by far
the greatest factor in the advancement of alphabetic literacy in
both the medieval and the modern eras. It was not
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enough to preach the Christian faith: one had to induce the
unlettered, tribal peoples to begin to use the technology upon
which that faith depended. Only by training the senses to
participate with the written word could one hope to break their
spontaneous participation with the animate terrain. Only as the
written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of
the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its
ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever
itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the
environing air. (p. 254)
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In this second example, Abram (1996) describes the importance of
the first breath a Navajo infant takes. This wind that the child
first breathes will determine the life and world the child will
grow up with. The act of breathing the first breath constitutes the
particular world of each individual Navajo child. Throughout his
book, Abram writes the verb to breathe with transformative power in
other ways as well. He writes of the childs breath in the middle
voice,When the baby is born, the Navajo say that the Wind within it
unfolds him and it is then, when the infant commences breathing,
that another, surrounding Wind enters into the child. This Wind may
be sent from one of the four directions along the horizon, or from
the Sun, or the Moon, or from the Ground itselfindeed from any
natural phenomenon. Of course, the particular Wind that enters with
the first breath will have a powerful influence upon the whole
course of that persons life. (Abram, 1996, pp. 232233)
Abram (1996) describes the transformative act of an Aboriginal
man walking an ancestors track of land. In Aboriginal culture, the
land is inseparable from the experience of the stories of the land
and its origins. To walk requires the Aboriginal to sing the story
of the ancestor who journeyed there. By the act of singing and
walking through his homeland, the man takes up the ancestral story
as his own and experiences the world of his ancestor as his own.
Abram writes of this walk in the middle voice,The Dreaming, the
imaginative life of the land itself, must be continually renewed,
and as an Aboriginal man walks along his Ancestors Dreaming track,
singing the country into visibility, he virtually becomes the
journeying Ancestor, and thus the storied earth is born afresh. (p.
170)
Abram (1996) describes the profound effect displacement has on
indigenous cultures in general. The land they call home, their
culture, and their understanding of the world are inherently
entwined. To be displacedto find themselves away from homeappears
in the middle voice, for by this action they are also displaced
from the very coherence of their experience. Abram writes,
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Exquisitely integrated into their surrounding ecologies,
indigenous, oral cultures were often so bound to their specific
terrains that other, neighboring ecologies other patterns of flora,
fauna, and climatecould seem utterly incongruous, threatening, even
monstrous. While such uncanniness may have helped to limit
territorial incursions into neighboring bioregions, and thus may
have minimized the potential for intertribal conflict, still there
were times when human bands were displaced from their familiar
landswhether by climatic changes, by changes in the migration
routes of prey, or simply by accident, and suddenly found
themselves in a world where their ritual gestures, their prayers,
and their stories seemed to lose all meaning, where the shapes of
landforms lacked coherence, where nothing seemed to make sense. (p.
269)
In this fifth and final example Ill quote herealthough there are
certainly more in the bookAbram (1996) describes the meditative
reading practice of a Kabbalist in the spirit of the middle voice.
As with most meditative practices, this form of reading transforms
the experience the Kabbalist has of the word and even the world
around him. Its worth noting that the Kabbalist experiences the
sacred language he studies as his home. Abram writes,By meditating,
when reading, not upon the written phrases, or even upon the words,
but upon the individual letters that gaze out at him from the
surface of the page, the Jewish mystic could enter into direct
contact with the divine energies. By combining and permutating the
letters of particular phrases and words until the words themselves
lost all evident meaning and only the letters stood forth in all
their naked intensity, the Kabbalist was able to bring himself into
increasingly exalted states of consciousness, awakening creative
powers that lay dormant within his body. Sometimes, when the
practitioner was reading in this concentrated and magical fashion,
the letters sprang to life of their own accord, and began speaking
directly to the mystic. (p. 245)
On pages 202203, Abram (1996) offers a personal account of
performing a meditative exercise. He describes going through a
series of actions that transforms his experience of the world
around him. He begins by focusing on his sense of time and his
breath. Then, by the magic of this active focus, a new world
appears to him. We find him writing of this new world in italics.
The exercise he engaged in is described in the middle voice. The
many actions he performs in a series, which include breathing and
sensing the time and space around him as one, appear both there and
elsewhere in the book as not only actions but also as words he,
himself, experiences as transformative. In other words, the
exercise he offers an account of on these pages draws on much of
his personal vocabulary, which bears the transformative spirit of
the middle voice. He reveals the magical words in his world and
shares them with his readers.
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In psychotherapy, I find that transformative experiences often
occur when the client or patient describes their experience of
their home as the place from which they come. The home is the place
of familial relationships. It is the place of dreaming. It is
sometimes the place of sexual relationships. The home is often the
place of intimacy. Transformative experiences occur in every childs
experience of the home. In discussing the home, be it Mother Earth
or an apartment in the Bronx, the client or patient often speaks in
the middle voice. I hear them changing as a character in their own
story when they tell the story of their experience coming from home
in a new way. Their body of language in therapy becomes something
new. Particular words take on new meanings that, as a therapist, I
am wise to recognize and follow. Recognizing the words that bear a
transformative power and the spirit of the middle voice offers me
an intimate understanding of how my clients and patients change and
how the people and things in their world change alongside them.
Ecopsychologists appreciate transformation through experiences of,
with, and in Nature. Their appreciation for transformation may also
aid them in individual psychotherapy. I suggest that
Ecopsychologists embrace the transformative power of the home as
their specialized interest as psychologists. Mother Earth is
certainly the home of the entire human race. But not everyone is
prepared to experience transformation in relation to the Earth. The
language that most of my clients and patients feel at home with
doesnt include words (let alone transformative words) related to
Nature. But everyone has words for experiences of transformation in
relation to the places they call home. I imagine that many
ecopsychologists appreciate the transformative power of the home
already as psychotherapists. Its this same spirit of appreciation
for the home that might bring a persons relationship with Nature
into view. Why not broaden the horizon of ecopsychology and
practice ecopsychology regularly in individual psychotherapy?
Although I dont treat clients by taking them out into the
wilderness, I do share in and cultivate their experience of home as
a participatory, revealing, and transformative place, which is,
etymologically speaking, ecopsychological practice.
REFERENCESAbram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous:
Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York:
Vintage Books. Lacan, J. (1997). The seminar of Jacques Lacan Book
III: The psychoses 1955-1956. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
(Original work published 1981) Liddell, H. G. and Scott, R. (1995).
An intermediate Greek-English lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University
Press (Original work published 1889) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The
visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1964) Mest,
R. (2002). The middle voice: The obsession/hysteria of
Derrida/Lacan. Unpublished manuscript.
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Mest, R. (2003). The ill made man. Amherst, MA: MestPressed.
(Available from the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne
University, Gumberg Library, Pittsburgh, PA 15282) Mest, R. (2005).
Psychological principles of an epicurean character. Manuscript
submitted for publication. Straus, E. (1980). Phenomenological
psychology. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.
AUTHOR NOTEDownloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network]
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Ryan Mest has a Masters Degree in Psychology from Duquesne
University and is currently working towards his Ph.D. there in
Clinical Psychology. He is the creator and editor of Grammata,
which is the graduate journal of psychology for the Duquesne
Psychology Department and is housed in the Simon Silverman
Phenomenology Center. He practices psychotherapy in the University
Clinic, as well as in the surrounding Pittsburgh area.