Emotion, true self, true other, core state: toward a clinical theory of affective change process.

Psychoanalytic Review, (in press) " Which end is nearer to God, if I may use religious metaphor, beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing; and that all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavor to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect man's history to man's psychology, man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use believing that we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy. And I do not think either end is nearer to God " (Feynman, quoted in Edelman, 1992, emphases added). " Human emotion is not just about sexual pleasures or fear of snakes. It is also about the horror of witnessing suffering and the satisfaction of seeing justice served; about our delight at the sensuous smile of Jeanne Moreau or the thick beauty of words and ideas in Shakespeare's verse; about the world weary voice of Fischer-Dieskau singing Bach's Ich habe genug and the simultaneously earthly and otherworldly phrasing of Maria Joao Pires playing any Mozart, any Schubert; and about the harmony that Einstein sought in the structure of an equation. Aiming toward developing a change-based metatherapeutics, i.e., a metapsychology of how and why what is therapeutic about therapy operates, this paper follows an arc where a psychoeveolutionary perspective at one end and aesthetics, spirituality, and the quest for personal truth at the other are shown to be seamlessly linked through the bodily rooted experience of emotion processed to completion. This arc is created by exploring how affective experiences associated with the operation of biologically-based wired-in emotional and relational processes naturally culminate in deeply therapeutic experiences Accessing processes mediated low down in our mammalian brain, we become able to soar to the greatest heights and plumb the greatest depths. This paper's version of " the whole structural interconnection of the thing " , " up and down, both ways " (see …