Janus Head

In this interview with Jan Hendrik van den Berg, the Dutch phenomenologist and psychiatrist addresses the origins of his work, his most significant influences, and the purpose of metabletic phenomenology in the modern age. In the course of the interview. Dr. Van den Berg provides a basic overview of his work, and highlights the central finding of his metabletic analyses: a loss of wonder before nature, which results from the more fundamental loss of genuine spirituality in the modern world.

Phenomenology plays a central part in Van den Berg's Metabletics. But phenomenology is not only a pure methodological or theoretical approach to reality: it also has an ethical implication. First of all, there is a certain respect for the things as they manifest themselves to us. Secondly, things are regarded as phenomena, situated in a context that gives meaning and significance. Finally, by avoiding so-called objectivity, things are not isolated entities, but realities accepted in their worldly integration. As Van den Berg demonstrates in his work, this approach has an important consequence in medical and psychological therapy. It resists the hypostatizing of science and technology, which is a process that deprives human beings of their humanity and the things of their existential reality. Being aware of the implicated meaning and significance of our daily-life situation, existential phenomenology represents an ethical and spiritual moment. We call it cautiousness.

The author offers a description of how his earliest encounters with Van den Berg inspired him, gave him a vision, a way of seeing, and his vocation to phenomenology and psychology. He acknowledges his indebtedness to how Van den Berg's style cultivates an aesthetic sensibility that has shaped his own efforts to find a poetic voice for psychological writing. Tracing out the path of a 40-year journey, and weaving in Van den Berg's work, the author shows how he came to appreciate phenomenology as a work of homecoming, how such homecoming is a matter of the heart, how metaphor is the language of the heart and its ways of knowing, and how Van den Berg's phenomenological metabletics guided his own metabletic studies on technology. At the end of the article he shows how he came to appreciate how metabletics is a cultural therapeutics and a foundation for an ethical epistemology.

This paper aims to extend Romanshyn's reading of van den Berg's metabletics as a process of recovering metaphoricity. Drawing upon research in contemporary cognitive linguistics, metabletics can be recast in terms of a process of re-metaphorization that requires a repeated sequence of stages. Initially a collective figuration exists in the culture as a form of negative metonymy, which serves the function of concealing a latent and taken-for-granted cultural meaning. By transforming the figuration from a form of negative metonymy to positive metonymy, the metabletic method reveals how one cultural event has stood for another cultural event. In the final stage of the metabletic process, the researcher shows how the cultural event not only has stood for another cultural event, but can been understood metaphorically in terms of, or through, the other cultural event. This final step recovers the metaphoricity of the cultural meaning, which in turn frees up the possibility for creating new meanings that were previously foreclosed.

A Heideggerian reading of J.H. van den Berg's writings contributes to an appreciation of phenomenological psychology as a cultural therapeutics. Both van den Berg's structural phenomenology of human existence and his Metablectic theory of historical changes lead to a notion of culture as a disclosive construction of the world. Our technological culture, in its reduction of all forms of relatedness to functionality (what van den Berg refers to as secularization), has repressed the spiritual dimension of contemporary life. The resultant derangement of social existence gives rise to the individual distress brought in to psychotherapy. Attention to the spiritual unconscious is the ethical obligation of phenomenological psychology that transcends, and in so doing contextualizes considerations of professional competency.

Van den Berg describes childhood as a historical invention of post-medieval Europe: childhood appears in response to cultural changes in adult existence and consciousness. This essay supplements van den Berg's argument by showing that the 12th century invention of literacy provides the textual technology to gradually effect these profound psychological changes in child and adult consciousness. A brief phenomenology reveals orality and literacy to be different forms of being in the world. As cultural practices they structure memory, knowledge, and identity in divergent ways.

In his original metabletic research on the nature of neurosis. Van den Berg revealed how, towards the 19th century, the increasingly complex and dividing nature of Western society led to the emergence of neurosis as a form of divided existence. By the mid 20th century, the manifestations of neurosis itself changed from a crystalized disorder to vague neurotic disturbances which Van den Berg related to the societal disorder, incoherence and instability which followed the second world war. He identified a series of neuroticizing factors at the time including the ambivalence of society, the increased mobility, a changed sense of time, the disappearance of small groups, the weakening of family ties and the fear of death. In our postmodern world today, the nature of neurosis has changed once again and awaits a new metabletic investigation to reveal its nature and its particular manifestations.

With reflections upon such disparate concepts as spirituality in medical science and the future well-being of Western civilization, the Dutch psychiatrist J. H. van den Berg applied an historical psychology of cultural change. His methodology offers a way to discern the development of discontinuity, paradox, and enchantment in the mathematics and science of the 20th century as they might inspire hope for a more holistic medical research and practice and for the healing of planet Earth.

In J.H. van den Berg's second volume of Metabletics of Matter, titled Gedane Zaken, he focuses on changes at two critical junctures in history, 1700 and 1900. Shortly before 1700, there were major changes in the fields of music and mathematics. An emphasis on mood in music and the appearance of infinitesimal calculus in mathematics appeared at the moment in history when respect for authority and the infinite were being replaced by a belief in human beings who were capable of everything. Great feats were to befall humanity during this period, but the downside of omnipotence would also leave an impact. The period around 1900, in contrast, was a time announcing discontinuity, of less belief in progress and in the capacity to dictate what the world is about. This shift in history signals a psychological transformation which introduces a psychological sense of magic and the uncontrollable.

The claim of metabletic phenomenology about the changing nature of reality is a claim about the relation etween humanity and reality. First, it indicates that reality is a reflection of human life. Second, metabletic phenomenology indicates that the mirror relation between humanity and reality is one of participation. The example of linear perspective painting will illustrate these points. In turn, four psychological themes are identified in Van den Berg's work. The first and second themes concern, respectively, the character and place of psychological reality. Themes three and four are addressed to the inherently therapeutic and ethical dimensions of Van den Berg's psychology.

Metabletics and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism are quasi-phenomenological traditions which examine psychological life in diametrically opposed ways. Metabletics examines historical-cultural phenomena, placing its focus on the world, while Buddhism examines the mind and its workings, placing its focus inward. Although both traditions conclude that there is ultimately no separation between inner and outer, their different motivations and methods reveal varying understandings of the nature of reality. This article begins with an examination of how each approach would account for a handprint embedded in stone in a cave wall in Nepal; this image provides an avenue for articulating the underlying philosophies of each. Then methodological differences are explored, whereupon I argue that Indo-Tibetan Buddhism reveals an ontological self within which the psychological self of metabletics can be situated. Conversely, this psychological self provides a realm of imagination for which Buddhism cannot account. Together, metabletics and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism provide complementary emphases on the immanent and transcendent aspects of reality and the psychological and spiritual aspects of humanity.

The human science or qualitative approaches to research have always argued that methodology must be determined by the subject matter under study. Yet the same approaches to data collection (i.e., the qualitative interview) and data analysis have been utilized by these approaches since their inception. The most essential lesson of van den Berg's metabletics is that no phenomenon is static or absolute. If human phenomena are ever-changing then the methodologies we use to study them must also change and adapt, so that we can more fully and authentically capture their meaning structures. This paper will develop this argument, and demonstrate the limitation of interviews for the study of the changing nature of human phenomena, utilizing psychotherapy research as an example.