Confessions of a Split Mind

By Paul Kiritsis

Confessions of a Split Mind is a compendium of selected drawings, philosophical dialogues, and two myths from Kiritsiss personal journal. Collectively, they capture an internal conflict between differing aspects of the conceptual self, which plays out in every one of us. For the author, this phenomenon takes the form of an ongoing war between science and esoteric spirituality. In the authors idiosyncratic inner world, the former discipline is personified by a male character known as the Unknown Pilot and the latter by a female character, Solim. The integrated conscious self also appears in the guise of a character named Olyn.
These three entities bide their time grappling with the big questions in life and arguing over the veracity of existing interpretations: Is it possible to explain genius-level creativity through contemporary scientific models? What exactly are the voices that psychosis sufferers hear? What is precognition, and what does it mean for a linear, materialistic model of the universe? Does free will exist? Have we underestimated the powers of the placebo and the mind? How much do we really know about the brain? Is it really like a computer as computational and connectionist models would have us believe? How therapeutic are creative pursuits? Does anything survive the death of the human body?
Each chapter deals with a different topic and is illustrated by thematic drawings. Many of the conundrums and life mysteries expounded in the broader narrative are represented visually in a separate section in the middle of the book, entitled Interlude: A Journey through the Split Mind.
The book begins and ends with the narration of personal myths whose purpose is to convey images of an ostensibly paradoxical world as it would appear to our logical operative cognition and the eitheror logic we pride ourselves on, hold aloft, and deem infallible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781546205524

Paul Kiritsis

Paul Kiritsis is an interdisciplinary scholar, poet, professional writer, certified hypnotherapist, and PsyD candidate in clinical psychology. His current practicum training experience involves working in the psychiatric intensive care unit of El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California. He holds an MA in psychology from Sofia University in Palo Alto, California, and an MA in history (Western esotericism) from Exeter University in Devon, UK. He also holds a graduate diploma in professional writing and speech and a BSc in behavioral science from Latrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He inaugurated the Dorothea Dix Award, giving those who have suffered mental and physical illness, disability, or injury a chance to be recognized for their expression through the written word. He is involved with various nonprofit organizations and has served as the vice chair of the San Francisco Psychological Association of Graduate Students, as the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students’ campus representative for Sofia University, and as the vice president of the Greek-Australian Cultural League based in Melbourne, Australia. His diverse interests straddle cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology, and philosophy of mind on one end of the spectrum and esotericism, comparative religion, history, and mythology on the other. To Write to the Author If you wish to contact the author or would like more information about Confessions of a Split Mind, please write to the author at [e-mail].

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© 2017 Paul Kiritsis. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/30/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0551-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0552-4 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0553-1 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017912994

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Narrative and the Expressive Arts

References

Chapter 1: The Secret Name

Chapter 2: Subliminal Uprush

Chapter 3: The Voice Phenomenon

Chapter 4: Precognition

Chapter 5: Determinism and Nondeterminism

Interlude: A Journey through the Split Mind

Chapter 6: The Power of Belief

Chapter 7: Deficits and Excesses, the Passions of the Brain

Chapter 8: Creativity and the Plight of Convalescence

Chapter 9: The Survival Hypothesis

Conclusion: The Battle of the Hemispheres—a Modern Myth

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Nobody has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except to literally get out of hell.

—Antonin Artaud

In memory of my paternal grandmother,

the Iron Lady

Sofia Kiritsis

1920–2015

I will never forget your magnanimity.

Preface

The conceptual kernel for Confessions of a Split Mind was born in March 2015, when I took a graduate course in creative expression. During that time, I became acutely aware of my own dichotomous nature and the conflicting ways in which I encounter reality—a paradoxical position that has been omnipresent in my life. I exhibit aesthetically masculine interests and qualities (e.g., rationalization, intellectualization) in my default choice of behaviors; however, coexisting side by side with those masculine traits is the premasculine identification with the mother and the somatic-emotional-intuitive self, that being a capacity for authenticity and creativity through poetry, art, and music. I suppose the latter also demonstrates interpersonal sensitivity, persistence, capability, and recourse to an adaptive strategy in the face of adversity.

Save for offering a welcome reprieve from the often dry and linear intellectual pursuit that is intrinsic to science, the course gave me the opportunity to acquaint myself with and effortfully cultivate a new expressive arts modality—drawing. Previously, I had expunged the contents of my soul onto paper exclusively through poetry and prose, but here was a modality that tapped primary process thinking on a more visceral, primordial, and symbolic level. The novel creative experience of combining both the verbal and visual arts to construct a multimodal narrative in a journal that I tentatively named Confessions of a Split Mind was deeply nourishing and gratifying from a psycho-spiritual perspective. It enabled me to penetrate beyond the surface layers of the personal ego-onion, through to the stygian area, where experiences ostensibly identified and overvalued as personal are in fact impersonal and archetypal, without connection to one spatiotemporal or sociocultural milieu, nor to any one collection of animate matter. If anything, the experience taught me that the underpinnings of human experience and our inner mental processes transcend sociohistorical conditions and are stubbornly and extraordinarily stable across time. I thoroughly enjoyed the shift in mental gears that made this eureka moment possible, and will enjoy transitioning there for years to come.

Confessions of a Split Mind is a compendium of selected drawings, philosophical dialogues, and two personal myths from my journal. Collectively they describe the internal conflict wrought by differing aspects of the conceptual self: the ongoing battle between science and esoteric spirituality, the secular and religious, cognition and emotion, intellect and intuition, the mechanistic and the holistic, the physical and the nonphysical, the aesthetically masculine and feminine, and so forth. In my own idiosyncratic inner world, the former polarized positions are personified by my animus, the Unknown Pilot, and the latter by my anima, Solim. In Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, the animus is understood as the masculine inner personality and the anima the feminine inner personality. Olyn, on the other hand, is a pseudonym for I, my integrated conscious self—the self that is always looking for conciliation, integration, and personhood.

Acknowledgments

Confessions of a Split Mind is both a labor of love and an epiphenomenon of an interminable search for a special something often parading under the banner of meaning-making. This quest, at once spiritual and deeply personal but also archetypal, sociohistorical, and collective, has been inspired, informed, and molded by my interactions with some very sagacious and compassionate individuals from a discipline of inquiry that I hold in the highest esteem.

I want to thank my clinical supervisors, Peter Scheufele and Brooke Ann Schauder, for their professional guidance and support, for enrichening my training experience and providing an empathic environment conducive to growth, and for resurrecting my faith in the sublime nature of the human condition.

I am extremely thankful to the great man Mikel Burroughs, president of Sponsor a Vet for Life (SAVL), for bestowing upon me the privilege and honor of working with US war veterans suffering from PTSD. That work must and will continue. I am humbled and proud to say that I have been a minute part of it.

A heartfelt thank you to Sean Lynn for his suggestions, constructive feedback, and input, and for the innumerable discussions we’ve had on intellectually stimulating issues spanning from magic, esotericism, and religion to social justice, ecology, science, and philosophy.

I express immense gratitude for the presence of Reta Singh in my life, a woman who has been an indispensable and unwavering support both personally and professionally. Reta has a profound maturity and emotional intelligence that is scarce and seldom encountered. I honor our very special bond. Reta, I will never take you for granted.

An earnest expression of gratitude to Jason Ly, a paragon of altruism, who has expedited my [re]transition to graduate school, oriented me to American culture, and been an indomitable steady source of emotional support, a pillar of stability and indestructibility. Our talks have inspired me, even when I’ve felt overwhelmed.

Eternal gratitude also to my beloved and immensely talented cousin, the artist Christos Stamboulakis, for inspiring me to try my hand at a new expressive arts modality, drawing.

Finally, I am deeply indebted to my family, who have made my wildest dreams possible. I consider myself very fortunate.

Introduction: Narrative and the Expressive Arts

In hindsight, the expressive arts endeavor is a prominent reminder of our plight to make meaning through narrative, and these cognitive processes lend themselves to interpretation through the theoretical lens of interpersonal neurobiology. Save for reflecting the sociocultural milieus and encompassing blueprints for behavior, identity, and theoretical knowledge in all known cultures, narrative probably emerged, in part, as a mechanism of neural integration and coordination between the dominant and nondominant hemispheres of the brain (Cozolino, 2010). If this is indeed true, then a multilevel function of personal narrative is to facilitate neural connectivity in the brain, emotional stability, psychological flexibility, and psychosomatic health. Dan Siegel, the child psychiatrist, has much to say about this curious phenomenon; the integrative neural processes occurring during formative periods of development can be vertical, dorsoventral, or interhemispheric (Siegel, 2012). The importance of the latter, according to Colwyn Trevarthen, cannot be overstated, because the anterior commissures and corpus callosum combined is the only pathway through which the higher functions of perception and cognition, learning and voluntary motor coordination can be unified (Siegel, 2012, p. 341). Associational neurons in the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes are the modus operandi, linking intricate representational processes of the hemispheres together (Cozolino, 2010).

On a similar note, the consensus among neuroscientists is that the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers interconnecting and coordinating the two hemispheres, doesn’t reach full maturity until the early teenage years (Galin, Johnstone, Nakell, & Herron, 1979). Concerning the importance of narrative in interhemispheric coordination, scientific treatises activate only the digital temporal processes of the dominant left hemisphere, whereas the combined visual imagery and linear storyline couched within real stories and fictional tales activates both the aforementioned and the holistic analogic processes of the nondominant right hemisphere (Siegel, 2012). In light of this interdisciplinary schema, it appears that our genetic and neurological constitution both come with in-built attractions for higher-order activities (e.g., reading and listening to stories or creating them) that are able to activate and hence integrate cortical and subcortical processing systems, the hippocampus and amygdala, and specific regions of the frontal lobes (Rossi, 1993). Moreover, creative storytelling stimulates denser connectivity between the language centers; the neural networks dedicated to memory, visceral, and emotional processing; and conscious awareness (Cozolino, 2010). Although they are unconscious, there’s a reason as to why we recourse to them when we’re suffering from self-perpetuated patterns of depression, anxiety, or over-emotionality, or a sense of emptiness, meaninglessness, and languishing in our lives. From a neurological perspective, then, my protoscientific attempts at ordering chaos by contrasting and comparing the quality of my inner mental life with that of another human being reflects that teleological striving for psychoneural integration.

People are far more likely to dabble with the creative arts when their narratives suffer fragmentation and life becomes increasingly meaningless and unpredictable. These states often lend themselves to an existential conceptualization, given that they spur radical life crises and transitions predicated upon especially salient encounters with the four fundamental givens of existence—death, isolation, meaninglessness, and freedom (Yalom & Leszcz, 2005). For me, grappling with an illness of unknown etiology at an early age and attempting to connect the dots on issues of symptomology was paradigmatic of nascent reality testing; however, the constricted frame of reference I married and adhered to like