Читать книгу Rethinking Therapeutic Reading - Kelda Green - Страница 11
ОглавлениеSENECAN TRAGEDY AND STOIC PHILOSOPHY
In Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, Jules Evans traces the origins of modern psychological therapies, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), back to their roots in the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, proposing that ancient philosophy lies at the heart of Western psychotherapy. As part of his research, Evans interviewed two of the founders of CBT, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck; of Ellis he writes:
Albert Ellis told me […] that he had been particularly impressed by a saying of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus: ‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about them’. This sentence inspired Ellis’s ‘ABC’ model of the emotions, which is at the heart of CBT: we experience an event (A), then interpret it (B), and then feel an emotional response in line with our interpretation (C). Ellis, following the Stoics, suggested that we change our emotions by changing our thoughts or opinions about events.1
The belief that ‘we change our emotions by changing our thoughts or opinions about events’ is fundamental to CBT and it is an idea of self-control that comes directly from Stoic philosophy. The most extensive surviving evidence that we have of ancient Stoic philosophy is provided by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman philosopher (4 BC–AD 65) described by Jules Evans as the author of ‘one of the first works of anger management in Western culture’.2 Within the 124 surviving philosophical letters in which many of the general principles of Stoicism are set out, Seneca outlines how by changing our thoughts or opinions about events, we can transform our emotions: ‘It is according to opinion that we suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.’3
In the 40 years since CBT was first developed by Ellis and Beck, its popularity and prevalence has dramatically increased. Bestselling CBT self-help books such as Mind over Mood have translated Stoic philosophy into practical manuals for modern living, and today CBT is the most commonly prescribed evidence-based psychological therapy in the United Kingdom. Between 2016 and 2017, 31 per cent of the 567,000 programmes that were completed under the government’s ‘Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies Scheme’ (IAPT) were in CBT, while a similar number of guided self-help programmes were completed – a low-intensity therapy which is based on the principles of CBT.4
A large number of studies have identified the benefits of CBT and shown it to be as effective – and in some cases more effective – than medication, particularly when used to treat depression and anxiety: ‘Researchers have found that a 16 week course of CBT helps around 75 per cent of patients to recover from social anxiety, 65 per cent to recover from PTSD and as much as 80 per cent from panic disorders.’5 Yet there are concerns – not least from among practising clinical psychologists – about the apparent dominance of CBT and its rigid, top-down and often overly manualised approach. A survey carried out in 2010 by the charity Mind found that only 8 per cent of patients deemed to require psychological therapy were offered any choice as to what that therapy might be: invariably patients were simply prescribed a course of CBT.6 As the clinical psychologist Joanna Cates writes, ‘There are a large number of people whose symptoms of anxiety and depression are caused by a myriad of other factors and for whom CBT is not necessarily the panacea it is sometimes promised to be. For this reason I question IAPT’s over-dependence on this model as a means of conceptualising and “treating” a person’s emotional distress.’7
In response to some of the concerns surrounding CBT, a ‘third-wave’ of psychodynamic therapies have been developed, including Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). These new therapies address some of the perceived limitations of CBT by incorporating elements of psychoanalysis, mindfulness and acceptance strategies.8 However, while rooted in Greek and Roman philosophy, CBT and its new variants still offer, I will argue, only second-order versions of the original, ancient models of therapy of those philosophies. Evans himself acknowledges that they are fragmented over-simplifications of much more complicated thought-systems:
It is inevitable that, in turning ancient philosophy into a sixteen-week course of CBT, cognitive therapists had to truncate it and narrow its scope, and the result is a rather atomised and instrumental form of self-help, which focuses narrowly on an individual’s thinking style and ignores ethical, cultural and political factors […] Self-help in the ancient world was far more ambitious and expansive than modern self-help. It linked the psychological to the ethical, the political and the cosmic.9
By turning back to the classical antecedents of modern psychology, this chapter aims to rediscover the ‘ambitious’ and ‘expansive’ model of therapy that was originally developed by the Stoics. It will attempt to restore an understanding of Stoicism as a whole, rather than the ‘truncated’ version of it that has been co-opted by the discipline of psychology. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre writes of the broader threat of moral incoherence posed by the truncation or fragmentation of ideas into isolated disciples:
What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.10
By retaining only the vocabulary of self-mastery, regularity and moderation or only the surface appearance of Stoic strategies while rejecting the core of the ‘conceptual scheme’ that holds together and provides the motivation for those strategies, we are left with only a shadow of the original thought. Psychology is smaller than cosmology and secondary to cosmology and necessarily so because psychology seeks to fulfil the second-order need for a smaller, private, personal space in the midst of the great all or nothing extremes of the tragedies. But equally, I am arguing that a psychology that has stripped Stoicism of its cosmology is depleted and must seek to reformulate that core cosmology if it is to offer more expansive forms of therapy.
Seneca’s surviving body of work consists of eight tragedies, a series of moral treatises, three consolations and one hundred and twenty-four letters to his friend Lucilius. The tragedies were written first and contain a degree of brutality and violence that does not sit comfortably alongside either the restraint of his later letters or our conventional understanding of Stoicism. In the centuries after Seneca’s death the tragedies and letters were deemed to be so incompatible that the misconception developed that there must have been more than one Roman philosopher named Seneca. The fifth-century orator Sidonius Apollinaris and later Renaissance thinkers Erasmus and Diderot are among those who believed there were multiple Senecas.11
While the philosophical letters have been celebrated and absorbed by the discipline of psychology, Seneca’s tragedies have been largely ignored in recent scholarship despite their noted influence on Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists.12 Professor of Classical Philosophy Brad Inwood makes no mention of the tragedies in his collection of essays Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome, other than to explain his omission in the introduction:
I have not said a word about Seneca’s poetic works, his dramas […] My decision rests partly on a sense of my own limitations and partly on the conviction that any philosophical influence probably runs from the prose works to the plays rather than the other way around […] For the purpose of this collection, Seneca the philosopher writes in prose.13
Within the philosophical letters themselves, Seneca argues against the kind of scholarship which focuses on fragments of a body of work at the expense of the whole. He admonishes his friend Lucilius for attempting to subdivide the complex philosophical ideas that they are studying together: ‘Look into their wisdom as a whole; study it as a whole. They are working out a plan and weaving together, line upon line, a masterpiece, from which nothing can be taken away without injury to the whole’.14 By dividing Seneca’s writing into two categories – namely the philosophical and literary texts – and examining each in isolation, scholars have marginalised Seneca’s literary output and failed to acknowledge fully the unifying thought-system of Stoic cosmology which connects the two.
This chapter will begin by looking at Seneca’s tragedies, arguing against Inwood’s assertion that ‘any philosophical influence probably runs from the prose works to the plays’, not least because the tragedies were most likely to have been written first. More particularly, the tragedies are home to first things, primary emotions and forces that suggest to me that they should be read first. The chapter will then go on to look at Seneca’s letters to Lucilius which contain his second-order attempts at setting out generalised guidance for living in adaptive accordance with the rules of Stoicism.
Contradictions and tensions are an important element of the Stoic cosmology and they exist within the tragedies and the prose as well as between them. In fact, internal contradiction is one thing which unifies these two seemingly disparate bodies of work. While on the surface, the tragedies are preoccupied with intense violence and unimaginable excess, they also contain places where small and very recognisably human pressure points are revealed. Similarly, within Seneca’s letters there are places where the surface restraint of Stoic philosophy appears to crack and reveal underlying psychological fault lines.
The Tragedies
In Act Three of Thyestes – a tragedy about two vengeful royal brothers – the titular character is persuaded to leave behind the safety of a life of obscure poverty, tempted back to the royal palace by his brother Atreus’s false promises of reconciliation. Some primitive part of himself – an almost archetypal version of anxiety – surfaces and attempts to halt the tragic momentum by which he is unknowingly being carried along:
You ask me why, I cannot tell you why
I am afraid; I see no cause for fear,
And yet I am afraid. I would go on;
But I am paralysed.15
A battle is taking place within these lines between surface logic and a lower, inner feeling of dread that can neither compromise nor explain itself in the language of reason. The instinctive, primal simplicity of ‘I am afraid’ comes from a different place within Thyestes to the second thought, the rational counterbalance of ‘I see no cause for fear.’ The two conflicting feelings exist simultaneously within him, each emerging from a different level or layer of his self. Reading vertically down the page, Thyestes’s fear is as relentless as his opposing drive to keep moving, ‘I am afraid / And yet I am afraid / But I am paralysed’ is like the sound of ruminating cogs in his brain. Thyestes’s logical half simultaneously struggles to understand how something can exist within him without evidence and without answers, ‘I cannot tell you why’/ ‘I see no cause for fear.’ The result of this internal conflict is psychological paralysis. His fear is the last barrier holding back the destructive momentum of the tragedy. And yet in the face of what seems an external urge for life, Thyestes is persuaded in the next scene by the arguments of his son to return to the palace and ‘I would go on; / But I am paralysed’ quickly turns to ‘Let us go on, then.’16
The impetus to keep driving onwards is the most powerful force within Seneca’s tragedies. Even when some part of Thyestes is instinctively dragging him back and trying to halt, another part of his self is leading him onwards; it is hard to know which is the force for good. Thyestes overrides the survival mechanism that has been triggered within his body and now the only way he will finally come to a halt is at the end of the play when tragedy has piled on top of tragedy and everything has been destroyed. Seneca pushes his characters towards the extreme point of disintegration and that final point of impact is the only thing that can stop their momentum.
The tragic momentum is a damaging consequence of a Stoic cosmology in which everything belongs to one unified continuum which is held together by a system of tensions: ‘Tonos is the energy system that, for better or worse, welds the Stoic cosmos into a unity. The tensional relationship between the constituents of the cosmos, including the incorporation of man and his life in the larger world, Posidonius called sumpatheia.’17 This is not sympathy in the modern sense, but rather a mutual interdependence or simultaneity of being at all levels in the cosmos. The concept of krasis – translated as ‘blending’ – was the epitome of sumpatheia for the Stoics. The ‘tensional relationship’ means that different elements within as well as between humans must be held together, and not necessarily in harmony:
Another term by which Cicero chooses to render sumpatheia is contagio, which is contact, in the medical sense, hence, sadly, infection. Certainly medicine, though supportive of the notion of harmony and balance and healthy tension, is fully alive to the variety of causes that may trigger a breakdown of the harmony, and to the extreme narrow scope within which tension can be expected to operate successfully.18
Tragic relationships are characterised by the version of sumpatheia that is contagion, and revenge spreads like an infection between Seneca’s characters. Generations of the same family are marked with violence as if their bloodline has been infected. The interconnected Stoic world view is dangerous because the set of conditions which are required to maintain healthy connections across the continuum are the same in nature as those that lead to sickness, but are much more difficult to sustain. The tragedies show what happens when the universe deviates from this ‘extreme narrow scope’ and is no longer operating successfully either on a macro, cosmic level or a micro, interpersonal level.
In Act Five of Thyestes, the tragic hero continues to struggle with a sense of dread and foreboding. Yet, at this point in fact, Thyestes has already unknowingly consumed the flesh of his own children, who have been murdered and fed to him by his brother Atreus:
Why, fool, what griefs, what dangers
Does your imagination see?
Believe your brother with an open heart.
Your fears, whatever they may be,
Are either groundless, or too late.19
The formulation ‘either groundless or too late’ is disturbingly characteristic of the tragedies. In this instance, it is already ‘too late’, and the unarticulated fear that has hung over Thyestes since the beginning of the play has now overtaken him, coming to pass in a form beyond anything he could have imagined. The future has already happened and it is only by not yet knowing the truth that Thyestes is able partially, but only temporarily, to hold off its full realisation. In Act Five, Thyestes is the last to learn what it is that he has already done.
There is a strange relationship between time and fear and time and knowledge in the tragedies. Time can speed up or slow down, go forwards or turn back on itself, stretch out or stall in the presence or absence of knowledge or fear. In the moments after something bad is revealed to have happened, the time before a character found out the truth can feel to him retrospectively warped. The structure of this play reflects the real instability of time, a deep discrepancy between time as it is felt internally and how it exists externally. By refusing to follow a sequential timeline, Seneca creates a different kind of framework that feels more like how it is to be stuck inside the nightmare-like logic of a bad experience. We cannot return to the moments before we knew something bad had already happened. When a truth is discovered, the past is retrospectively reshaped by the present and what was small, insignificant and fleeting at the time becomes large. There is a sickening vertigo in this forwards-backwards motion which acts in defiance of simple cause and effect, for the effect almost creates its cause in retrospect. Boundaries that are crossed blindly in real time can only be seen afterwards and from a distance. The tragedies seem to be fixated with these boundary lines: Where does a tragedy start? Where does it finish? And where is ‘too late’ located if anywhere? Ignorance, like fear, is a mechanism for holding back or temporarily halting the flow of time, it creates a temporary safety. But fear, ignorance and paralysis are the unhealthy versions of stopping, just as revenge and greed, lies and secrets provide the fuel for a negative, unhealthy version of progress.
The tragedy of Phaedra is set in motion when Phaedra – the wife of Theseus – attempts to seduce her step-son Hippolytus, and when rejected, publicly accuses him of rape. As so often in Seneca’s tragedies, the terrible consequences of the breakdown of natural relationships subsequently unfold like a distorted version of the genetic code.
When Theseus hears the allegations against his son, he calls on the Furies to exact a terrible punishment on Hippolytus. The innocent son is brutally killed and his body is torn into fragments. The image of the physically broken child lying in pieces before his guilty father powerfully recurs in Thyestes, Phaedra and Hercules. The fragmentation of human bodies – and more specifically of children’s bodies – is another consequence of the forces at work within the tragedies that are breaking apart the connective bonds of the Stoic cosmos. There is a constant struggle and a constant failure within the tragedies to keep hold of the whole of something, whether that be the whole of a body, a family, or a much larger cosmic whole.
In Act Five of Phaedra, having discovered his wife’s deception too late to save his son, Theseus weeps over his dismembered child and desperately attempts to rebuild Hippolytus’s body out of the rubble of his limbs. As so often, it is only after time has run out and characters have reached rock bottom that a kind of space or stillness emerges that means that the tragedy has finally ground to a halt. I am interested in Seneca’s work in these areas: what happens after the breaking point has been reached and what does a character do after it is already too late? Amid all the fury and chaos of the tragedies this is one of the moments of quiet where the resolve to repair and preserve something of what has been broken resurfaces:theseus
theseus:Trembling hands, be firm
For this sad service; cheeks, dry up your tears!
Here is a father building, limb by limb,
A body for his son … Here is a piece,
Misshapen, horrible, each side of it
Injured and torn. What part of you it is
I cannot tell, but it is part of you.
So … put it there … not where it ought to be,
But where there is a place for it.20
The father tries to reconstruct his offspring, but here in the chaotic world of the tragedies the starting point is utter fragmentation, and the process of rebuilding cannot hope to reconstruct the body as ‘it ought to be’. In this world of physically and mentally broken people where minds and bodies have been mangled, there can only be this hesitant, stilted attempt to retain and reassemble some trace of the human form. It is impossible to replicate life as it was before tragedy, but, out of the jumble of pieces that we are left with, the task is to create something that resembles life: a second version of ourselves.
More than any of Seneca’s plays, Hercules is preoccupied with what happens after tragedy. Here the powerful force of energy or momentum which made Hercules a hero is subverted when he murders his own family in a frenzied attack fuelled by madness. It is, however, that same force of energy which must somehow be preserved and reactivated if he is to survive beyond the immediate tragedy.
After the slaughter, Hercules falls into a deep sleep and when he eventually wakes to find his step-father Amphitryon and friend Theseus watching over him, he has no recollection of what has happened:
amphitryon:These troubles must just pass in silence.
hercules:And I remain unavenged?
amphitryon:Revenge often does harm.
hercules:Has anyone passively endured such troubles?
amphitryon:Anyone who feared worse.
hercules:Can one fear anything, father, that is even worse or more painful than this?
amphitryon:How little of your calamity you understand!
hercules:Have pity, father, I hold out my hands in supplication. What? He pulled back from my hands: the crime is lurking here. Why this blood? What of that shaft, soaked by a boy’s blood. Now I see my weapons. I need not ask about the hand. Who could have bent that bow, what hand flexed the string that barely yields to me? I turn to both of you again, father is this crime mine? They are silent: it is mine.21
Amphitryon attempts to keep the next wave of the tragedy at bay by holding back the knowledge of what Hercules has done. But what begins as a father’s attempt to counsel his son falls apart as the truth bursts out of the very silence that Amphitryon has tried to create as a protection. His counsel fails when it comes up against the enormity of the tragedy. His body cannot help revealing the truth that his brain had attempted to conceal as – despite himself – Amphitryon instinctively flinches from his son’s supplicating hands. In the final line, Hercules’s question ‘is this crime mine?’ is answered with a silence that can have no other meaning than ‘it is mine’.
Unlike many of Seneca’s tragedies which end with only the promise of further acts of vengeance, Hercules finishes with the fragile hope that the hero – with the help of his two companions Theseus and Amphitryon – will be able to heal his wounded mind and find a way to continue living.
In Act Five – in another ancient version of sumpatheia – Amphitryon threatens to kill himself unless Hercules refrains from suicide. Faced with Amphitryon’s threat, the tragedy grinds to a halt. Repetition across the tragedies is key. Every character, across all eight plays, is caught within the same cycle of cosmic decline and each is rushing towards these points of stillness in the aftermath of repeated action:
Stop now, father, stop, draw back your hand. Give way, my valour, endure my father’s command. This labour must be added to the Herculean labours: to live. Theseus raise up my father’s body, collapsed on the ground. My crime-stained hands shun contact with the one I love.22
As Hercules repeatedly calls for death to ‘stop’, the trajectory of the tragedy turns from death back towards life. The parts of Hercules that allowed him to be heroic are called into action again, but now the monster that he must slay is a psychological one. What is crucial is this shifting internal chemistry that turned a man from hero to crazed murderer: both are made of the same elemental ingredients. After the tragedy, the struggle is now to regain some version of that first formulation that allowed Hercules to survive unbearable situations. It is impossible to go backwards and retrieve an unstained version of his self: he must find a second copy of that first self and apply it now to the essential labour of living. Keeping himself alive after the tragedy will be the hardest labour of all for Hercules. Rather than a single act of strength or valour, it is a task which will demand a continuous, extended exertion of will, for while destruction can be done in a flash, survival is a long, drawn-out process.
The Stoic cosmology tells us that with every connection comes the threat of infection, and that every creative force holds the potential to become a destructive force, but the tragedies also tell us that these are the very parts of human beings – the riskiest parts on the very knife-edge between order and chaos – which must be preserved. The Stoic laws reassert themselves here at the end of the tragedy through the voice of Theseus, a man who has himself endured huge tragedy and who now guides Hercules to ‘Rise up, break through adversity with your usual energy. Now regain that spirit of yours which is a match for any trouble, now you must act with great valour. Do not let Hercules give way to anger.’23 The task of self-preservation can only begin once we have first witnessed the primal limits of self-destruction. It is through the tragedies that an audience can come to know what they – as humans – are up against and which parts of themselves most need to be preserved. The tragedies, with their original, primal forces must therefore come first and the more generalised laws and guidance of Stoicism – like that of Seneca’s 124 philosophical letters – can only come second.
The Letters
Seneca’s philosophical letters were written during the final years of his life, after he had retired from public life. Having served as tutor and advisor to the Roman Emperor Nero for 15 years, Seneca had become extremely well known and wealthy. He had also become entangled in an increasingly corrupt and brutal political elite. In his enforced retirement, Seneca attempted to bring his life back into line with the Stoic principles that he had been advocating throughout his professional life but perhaps not always adhering to.
The letters are addressed to a Sicilian official named Lucilius, although scholars have suggested that he is a fictional rather than a genuine correspondent as no historical evidence of Lucilius’s existence has been found other than Seneca’s letters to him. In her biography of Seneca, Emily Wilson notes that, ‘His name, again suspiciously, seems reminiscent of Seneca’s own: Lucilius is like Seneca’s own smaller, younger self. At times, Seneca seems to present Lucilius as an idealised counterpart to himself.’24 Whether Lucilius was a real person or not, writing to him allowed Seneca to remain ostensibly within the private rather than public realm during his retirement and to be more personal than he had previously been in the tragedies or in the moral treatises that he had written earlier in his life.
Seneca presents himself as the older and wiser of the two friends in the majority of his letters. His explicit aim is to provide Lucilius with a set of useful guidelines which will help him to maintain a healthier mental life: ‘There are certain wholesome counsels which may be compared to prescriptions of useful drugs; these I am putting into writing.’25 In these letters Stoicism is used as a second-order preventative medicine, holding back the threat of contagion which proved to be so damaging in the tragedies:
Hold fast, then, to this sound and wholesome rule of life; that you indulge the body only so far as is needed for good health. The body should be treated more rigorously, that it may not be disobedient to the mind. Eat merely to relieve your hunger; drink merely to quench your thirst; dress merely to keep out the cold; house yourself merely as a protection against personal discomfort.26
This programme of Stoic restraint is designed to prevent the possibility of miniature versions of the tragedies taking place. The mind must remain in control and even the smallest degree of excess cannot be tolerated. The very syntax of the letter is related to its function of prevention. Rather than, ‘relieve your hunger by eating’, the instruction here is to ‘eat merely to relieve your hunger’. In each clause of both the English translation and original Latin, the preventative action precedes the effect that it aims to pre-empt: ‘Cibus famem sedet, potio sitim extinguat, vestis arceat frigus.’27 This almost back-to-front syntax disrupts the pattern of cause and effect and demands a mental readjustment from the reader. Seneca’s dynamic syntax allows concepts to be rapidly turned on their heads; false and unhelpful beliefs can be quickly replaced by or remade into new, more constructive beliefs.
The relationship between Seneca and Lucilius is not always straightforwardly that of a teacher and student or of comforter and comforted. Against hubris and against the borrowed authority of teaching a version of himself, Seneca occasionally steps down from his position of authority and repositions himself not as doctor but as his own patient, not as teacher but as his own student and not as wise philosopher but as a man struggling to meet his own demands. It is in these places that the dynamic of the letters changes. Cracks appear in the surface veneer of Stoic restraint and Seneca’s own psychological struggles can be glimpsed. In these places where the individual is revealed within the general, tensions are shown to exist between the philosophy of Stoicism and the psychology of the man attempting to comply with that philosophy.
While it is helpful to have frameworks and maps that provide a general route or strategy for healthy thinking, the really useful parts of the letters are often paradoxically where the framework doesn’t quite accommodate reality, where something bursts out from deeper within or when the strategy is derailed, and Seneca admits his contradictions, failures and struggles rather than always trying to have a solution. Without these cracks, the letters can be smoothed too easily into something like what has become the generic counsel of CBT. In Letter LXVIII Seneca deviates from the conventional pattern of him imparting advice on his struggling friend. Here he rejects the idea that he can help Lucilius and instead attempts to pause and find a place to ‘lie quiet’ and repair himself:
What, then, am I myself doing with my leisure? I am trying to cure my own sores. If I were to show you a swollen foot, or an inflamed hand, or some shrivelled sinews in a withered leg, you would permit me to lie quiet in one place and to apply lotions to the diseased member. But my trouble is greater than any of these, and I cannot show it to you. The abscess, or ulcer, is deep within my breast. […] There is no reason why you should desire to come to me for the sake of making progress. You are mistaken if you think that you will get any assistance from this quarter; it is not a physician that dwells here, but a sick man.28
Seneca is at his best when he rejects or rather transmutes the doctor/invalid dynamic and instead moves fluidly between the two roles: sometimes he is one, sometimes he is both, and at other times he is neither. Then the reader sees both the need for counsel and the underlying condition that struggles to follow it, in dialogue. So in Letter XIII Seneca again takes off his public mask and writes:
There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. I am not speaking with you in the Stoic strain but in my milder style. For it is our Stoic fashion to speak of all those things, which provoke cries and groans, as unimportant and beneath notice; but you and I must drop such great-sounding words, although, Heaven knows, they are true enough.29
This is the shift from public philosophy to personal psychology. The ‘Stoic strain’ is a fragile and finely balanced web of preconditions, and there is always potential difficulty in bridging the gap between general solutions and personal, specific experiences. The letters exist on one ‘plane’ but beneath them, bubbling under the surface, are powers and problems akin to the dangerous forces and resistances that explode in the tragedies. The letters need to be interpreted in terms of an extra dimension of shifting relationships, and not simply taken as abstract and programmatic counsel.
Prior to writing the letters to Lucilius and during a period of forced exile in Corsica that lasted from AD 41 to AD 49, Seneca wrote a series of three ‘consolations’. Two of these texts – ‘The Consolation to Marcia’ and ‘The Consolation to Polybium’ – were addressed to members of the Roman elite whose children had died. They provide an outline of Stoic guidance on grief but were also written in the hope of gaining favour with influential figures who may have been able to help Seneca after he had been cast out of Rome, accused of committing adultery with Emperor Caligula’s sister. But the third consolation was written to Seneca’s own mother Helvia, not as with the others to give her comfort or guidance following a bereavement, but rather to ease her suffering during his own exile. In this letter, personal tragedy, individual psychology and general philosophy intersect as Seneca attempts to put Stoicism into practice. Now Seneca is both his mother’s comforter and the cause of her distress and this paradox is at the heart of the text, where Seneca is always at his best when he is two-sided:
Although I consulted all the works written by the most famous authors to control and moderate grief, I couldn’t find any example of someone who had comforted his own dear ones when he himself was the subject of their grief. So in this unprecedented situation I hesitated, fearing that I would be offering not consolation but further irritation. Consider, too, that a man lifting his head from the very funeral pyre must need some novel vocabulary not drawn from ordinary everyday condolence to comfort his own dear ones. But every great and overpowering grief must take away the capacity to choose words, since it often stifles the voice itself.30
Seneca was living through his own tragedy now and as all personal tragedies feel on the inside, this experience was ‘unprecedented’. None of the general and theoretic ‘works written by the most famous authors to control and moderate grief’ offer any assistance to him in this moment. Seneca requires ‘some novel vocabulary’ rather than generic words of hope or condolence. ‘Everyday’ language proves inadequate when faced with the messy, painful reality of actual life. Neat Stoic maxims cannot work here for they would appear too straightforwardly reductive. Instead, Seneca needs a way of communicating with his mother which acknowledges the duality of their current relationship and which will allow him to comfort her both despite and because of the fact that he is also the cause of her suffering.
As in Hercules, where the counsellors Theseus and Amphitryon fall silent in the face of tragedy, ‘overpowering grief’ silences Seneca. Tragedy renders us mute, removing ‘the capacity to choose words’. However, despite Seneca’s initial sense of inarticulacy and hesitancy he is able to fashion a letter of consolation to his mother. Seneca’s approach – like that adopted from him by CBT – is not to try to change his situation, but instead to change the way that he and his mother think about his situation. He describes his letter as his mother’s ‘treatment’31 and as such it is an early model of therapy. The consolation contains a description of the long chain of losses that Seneca’s mother has suffered throughout her life, beginning with the loss of Helvia’s own mother who died while giving birth to her. Like Hercules’s step-father Amphitryon for whom ‘the end of one trouble is the stepping stone to the next’,32 Helvia’s life appears to have been an interminable cycle of sorrow.
Instead of becoming a victim of the tragic momentum, Helvia must have a way of thinking about her past suffering that will help her now to face her present suffering. Not by getting rid of it but by being it, changing its shape and using it as best she can. As his mother’s counsellor, it is Seneca’s job to provide her with the new helpful thought that she herself – stuck within her own predicament – might not have been able to create for herself. The paradox of this letter is that Seneca has not only caused the suffering that he must now counsel his mother through, but that he must counsel her through a predicament that he too is trapped within. The letter is an explicit attempt to reprogramme Helvia’s thoughts, but in the writing of it, Seneca was also rewiring his own thoughts:
So this is how you must think of me – happy and cheerful as if in the best of circumstances. For they are best, since my mind, without any preoccupation, is free for its own tasks.33
In the first sentence Seneca instructs his mother to think of him ‘as if in the best of circumstances’, but in the second sentence the wishful thinking of ‘as if’ becomes a reality: ‘for they are best’. This shift demonstrates on the page the way in which an opinion can determine reality and thus define the subsequent emotional response. If Seneca or his mother permit themselves to face his exile with the wrong opening thought – that Seneca is unhappy and miserable and in the worst of circumstances – then further negative emotions will duly follow.
Seneca finds counsel for himself in the primary chemistry and physics of the Stoic cosmology rather than the compact, second-order maxims of more conventional, ‘everyday’ Stoic philosophy. What he needs is a different perspective:
How silly then to imagine that the human mind, which is formed of the same elements as divine beings, objects to movement and change of abode, while the divine nature finds delight and even self-preservation in continual and very rapid change.34
Seneca is always at his most powerful when he is speaking of ‘the same elements’ and seeking ways to recombine them. By finding a way to reconcile his particular position in the word – alone, uncertain and involuntarily detached from his community – with the wider universe beyond his single, particular self, Seneca was able to comfort himself and then go on to at least try to comfort his mother:
So, eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men. From whatever point on the earth’s surface you look up to heaven the same distance lies between the realms of gods and men. Accordingly, provided my eyes are not withdrawn from that spectacle, of which they never tire; provided I may look upon the sun and the moon and gaze at the other planets; provided I may trace their risings and settings, their periods and the causes of their travelling faster or slower; provided I may behold all the stars that shine at night […] provided I can keep my mind always directed upwards, striving for a vision of kindred things – what does it matter what ground I stand on?35
The mother and son are reunified as Seneca begins to write in the first-person plural, ‘let us hasten’. Here is the healthy version of the cosmology, rather than the fractured and infected cosmos of the tragedies where the system has failed. Individuals are able to reconnect the circuitry between one another and plug into the wide expanse beyond them, to think further than the limits of their own internal psychologies and to escape the limitations of the everyday, small world. The tensions of the cosmos are still visible here in the repeated formulation, ‘provided I may’ or ‘provided I can’, for the success of this system is dependent on a series of conditions or provisions which must be met. There is a fragility built into this worldview, and health and sickness, consolation and sorrow are all finely balanced. By mentally positioning himself within the cosmos, Seneca rejects the constraints and difficulties of this one particular spot of earth that he has been exiled to and enters into a vision of a much larger common space.
Notes
1Jules Evans, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (London: Rider Books, 2012), pp. 3–4; hereafter cited as ‘Evans’.
2Ibid., p. 60.
3Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gunmere, The Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), ii, Letter LXXVIII, p. 189; hereafter cited as Epistles.
4Carl Baker, ‘Mental Health Statistics for England: Prevalence, Services and Funding’, House of Commons Briefing Paper, 25 April 2018.
5Evans, p. 8.
6Mind, ‘We Need to Talk: Getting the Right Therapy at the Right Time’ (2010), https://www.mind.org.uk/media/280583/We-Need-to-Talk-getting-the-right-therapy-at-the-right-time.pdf, accessed 12 February 2015.
7Joanna Cates, ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Is Not Always the Answer for Anxiety and Depression’, Huffington Post, 10 March 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/joanna-cates/cognitive-behavioural-not-always-the-answer_b_6814562.html, accessed 20 March 2015.
8Tom J. Johnsen and Friberg Oddgeir, ‘The Effects of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as an Anti-Depressive Treatment Is Falling: A Meta-Analysis’, Psychological Bulletin 141(4) (2015), pp. 747–68.
Lars-Goran Ost, ‘Efficacy of the Third Wave of Behavioural Therapies: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 46 (2008), 296–321.
9Evans, p. 11.
10Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984), p. 2.
11Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 8; hereafter cited as ‘Rosenmeyer’.
12T. S. Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, in Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), pp. 3–55 (p. 3).
13Brad Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 5–6.
14Epistles, i, XXXIII, p. 237.
15Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Thyestes’, in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 43–96 (p. 81); hereafter cited as Thyestes.
16Ibid., p. 66.
17Rosenmeyer, p. 107.
18Ibid., p. 111.
19Thyestes, p. 87.
20Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Phaedra’, in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 97–152 (p. 108).
21Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Hercules’, in Eight Tragedies, trans. John G. Fitch, The Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), i, pp. 36–159 (p. 101); hereafter cited as Hercules.
22Ibid., p. 157.
23Ibid., p. 153.
24Emily Wilson, The Greatest Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 181.
25Epistles, i, VIII, 37.
26Ibid., i, VIII, 39.
27Ibid., i, VIII, 38.
28Ibid., ii, LXVIII, 49.
29Ibid., i, XIII, 75.
30Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Consolation to Helvia’, in On the Shortness of Life, trans. C. D. N. Costa (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 34–67 (p. 34); hereafter cited as Helvia.
31Ibid., p. 37.
32Hercules, p. 65.
33Helvia, p. 67.
34Ibid., p. 42.
35Ibid., pp. 45–46.
