Apprehending the other as a principle

One the most fundamental principles of the work with others in Psychology is the notion of trying to understand the Other in his or her uniqueness. Some call this empathy but in a way is more than that.

Empathy is the movement that starts in ourselves and that tries to acknowledge the experiential nature of the Other, on how they feel and how and why their emotions and feelings are presented.

In the book from Laing (1965) about the existential analysis of sanity and madness, the author makes the point that underpins the existential and experiential studies of humanistic theories. Laing draws our attention to the fact that (us who work with individuals in psychology or psychiatry) the Other should be apprehended totally and completely. This is not to say that they should be removed from their uniqueness, on the contrary.

We should try to love the other person, love their lives in their uniqueness form and subtract. This means not to just be empathetic about their depression symptoms or their inability to write as well as other children do but, primarily, the individual and their complexity. This deceivingly simple argument yet powerful has the potential to transform do way we work.

Loving the existence of another, or as I prefer, to apprehend their existence, is to not only be empathetic about their symptoms and guided by their signs but mainly to see them according to their uniqueness in the scope of their self-development.

Several examples in my work as a Psychologist could be discussed. A simple one could be the case of a kid who doesn't engage in classes and doesn't care about marks or success. We can be empathetic about his life story and understand the pain that he experienced in his early years. We would also make notes of the signs, for instance, the lack of engagement and frequent externalising behaviours. We may identify speech and language difficulties or emotional and social interactions difficulties. They have our empathy. However, that's not enough.

Either focusing on mental health issues or educational and learning difficulties, we need to take the Other in their existential position and to acknowledge that what separates us from them and also what unites us to them is part of the dialogical nature of existence. In that intersection, we are related but also isolated, although closely linked in the fabric of being.

Going back to the example, this implies acknowledging the signs we see as part of the bigger picture that their existence is, where truth is the only fact, because uniqueness can't deceive. By apprehending the other, we could learn about the processes and experiential subtracts that made this kid to be who he is now and to frame signs as expressions of his uniqueness. This doesn't exclude working to help him overcome his difficulties in specific aspects of his learning but to see them as an intrinsic part of his being in the process of self-organisation.  

Apprehending the other is the process that allows you to identify and understand the complexity of the self and the nature of its different expressions.

Laing, R. D. (1965). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Middlesex: Penguin Book, Ltd. 

The unimaginative relation of an I and a Me

We are eminently set up to relate. Naturally equipped with the relational tools to engage with different people and different selves in our inner audience. Automagically predisposed to build bridges of mutual agreed meaning. But something is utterly overwhelming in how we relate with ourselves: I is vague and Me is deeply unimaginative. This leads to violent spin in our axis of diversified personal positions. Our different Me's battle with our different views of an I that lives in complete solitude.

When you think of yourself you realize that not only you think of yourself but also about all the mixture of different views and meanings of I's and Me's. This eventually creates a spectrum of unintelligible movements towards personal meaning. I is not an I when the Me's are chosen to replace an I. This means that the views of oneself, either by our distinctive personal perspective or by other's perceptions of oneself, are glued in our consideration of personal intelligibility. Full of different and concurrently perspectives of being, one tend to fall in pieces, having no ability to clean what belongs to the I and what doesn't. This is particularly acute with people that have a tremendous difficulty reading the entire scope of their feelings. The complete confusion of space, time and self leads to an undisputed battle ring. One decision comes out as a superlative form of adaptation to chaos, leaving all the polyphony with a lowered volume and significance.

We struggle to make sense of our lives; we battle to make our decisions meaningful; we strive to persist. But we don't fully understand what the I includes and what relations it has. We don't fully understand the origins or justifications of your personal movements of meaning construction because we are constantly redefining our coordinates.