Zak Stein's Meta-Psychology Synthesis
Three Ways of Working with the Psyche: Ensoulment, Development & Transcendence
This synthesis summarizes Zak Stein’s Metapsychology as presented in four episodes on The Stoa. What is written here includes both paraphrased and direct quotes from Zak Stein.
You can watch the Stoa talks below.
Metapsychology - language, image, and symbol of the psyche for the psyche
The metapsychology aims to bridge metaphysics and psychology.
What is the Psyche?
The difficulty of working with psyche is that you are psyche.
Where and what is psyche? (You can’t locate it)
There have been attempts to “locate” psyche in biology, culture, genetics, neuroscience.
There have been attempts to “dislocate” psyche in (collective) unconscious, spirit, cosmos, and myth.
There have been attempts to “dispense” with psyche through reduction, fragmentation, and explanation.
Psyche is amenable to all of the above, manifesting complexity, polysemy, polarity, and multiplicity.
You can’t disentangle psychology as a science from philosophy.
You also can’t disentangle it from religion and the things typically classed as religious concern.
Three Modalities of the Psyche
The three modalities of psyche all involve the four quadrants and chaos/complexity dynamics.
They co-arise, mutually enmesh, and reciprocally enable.
The three modalities of psyche are not “within” the psyche, nor “parts of” the psyche, nor functions, mechanisms, or structures.
They are primordial categories in terms of which the psyche understands itself.
Each modality or domain is a different way of understanding and working with the psyche.
Ensoulment:
Works with image, imagination, personality
Deepens our personality structure
Moves through stations (Pre-tragic, tragic, post-tragic)
Frames problems
Development:
Works with language, cognition, capacity (How do we work within a world of causality), Skill building, and becoming more capable
Moves through stages
Attempts to solve problems
Transcendence:
Works with Symbol, attention, and consciousness
Takes us from personal to impersonal
Moves through phases or altered states of consciousness
Reflects back on our problem-solving
Diving Deeper into the domain of Ensoulment
A prominent thinker in this space is James Hillman.
Examples of stations include pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic.
Growth is categorized as emotional maturity or individuation.
Loveinger blended ensoulment and development together in her ego development model.
Images are fragments of a myth.
A lot of what you are trying to do in psychotherapy is catch the image.
Crying is a practice of ensoulment.
Archetypal images - Root Metaphors of the psyche, sources of personhood.
To say an image is archetypical is different than to say that there are archetypes in the image.
To say that the image is archetypical is to say it’s really richly texture.
What is the archetype in the pathology such that it is sane?
Personality is the imaginal schemas of interpersonal interaction, — the image of self in relationship.
Ensoulment is a temporary process of moving deeper into the muck of the world.
Diving Deeper into the domain of Development
Certain stages can’t be moved through until there are requisite stages of development.
Development is messy.
We talk more about the stages than how to move between them.
Skill acquisition and language development.
Skills are highly context-dependent.
There is a tension of development between skills.
Development isn’t static we are always moving between levels.
Diving deeper into the Domain of Transcendence
You move through phases.
Symbolic immortality - through experienced continuity with life, history, and the real.
The soul orients towards death….the transcendent orients towards immortalit.y
Three classic paths to transcendence: meditation, entheogen, & service/care.
If we can’t imagine a future we can’t construct a symbolic immortality.
Consciousness moves through phase shifts that affect your ability to metabolize experience.
If you enjoyed this synthesis you may also enjoy this podcast exploring Zak’s approach to human development.
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Loved the connection with different unique interpretations of domain metaphysics for essentially the same common three modalities. THANKS for this synthesis!