City Shadows. Psychological Interventions in Psychiatry by Arnold Mindell

Author:Arnold Mindell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

Analogously, when we see a beautiful, youthful person with a winning smile, few are likely to think that a fleeting though repetitive signal such as a blank or vacant expression could be of much significance.

Thus one of the challenges in working with extreme and borderline states is to examine critically our tendency to overlook disharmonious signals. Missing signals of discontent allows us to idealize the efficacy of our methods. A positive way of formulating this challenge is to understand borderline states as tests in developing what Suzuki (1976) calls in his book on Zen, a ‘beginner’s mind.’

Having a beginner’s mind is the only way to help the therapist work with extreme states, for it allows a more developed perception of the environment and a more developed feedback loop, the two things the person suffering from schizophrenia lacks. The beginner’s mind neither thinks nor feels, but is simply open. A beginner’s mind notices that the schizophrenic in the extreme state seems unrelated to his immediate environment, flip-flops according to who occupies what part in his field and sends valuable nonverbal messages to the rest of us which need to be taken seriously.

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