Into the Maelstrom: Toward a Theory of Chaos and Crisis

By Gordon Cappelletty

From the crisis of birth to the crisis of death, each person’s life is defined by the crises experienced and the ways in which the resulting chaos is resolved. As universally experienced events, our personal identities are influenced by the past crises that mold and shape our view of ourselves and our relationships with others. Chaos, as the inevitable result of the crisis state, allows us to see our lives in new and unique ways unbounded by our past limitations. While some individuals exit the maelstrom of a crisis with apparent ease, other individuals seem to live in the chaos of perpetual crisis never fully exiting the whirlpool of emotions and never fully experiencing the calm after the multiple storms that seem to continually confront them. Written jointly by a clinical psychologist (Cappelletty) and an ethical philosopher (Màdera), this book will help both the individuals facing a crisis as well as those who wish to help them resolve the crisis and move forward. Based on psychological, medical and philosophical research and practice, this examination of crisis and chaos will help the suffering person in love and life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781649795731

Gordon Cappelletty

Gordon Cappelletty holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology in Fresno. He filled the role of clinical director with Mental Health Services of Catawba County and is currently a professor of psychology and Interim Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina. Romano Màdera is a professor of moral philosophy and philosophical practices at the University of Milano. He is a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). He is the founder of Philo, School of Philosophical Practices, and SABOF (Society for Biographic Analysis Philosophically Oriented). Among his books are La carta del senso (2012), Una Filosofia per l’anima (2013) partly translated into English as Approaching the Navel of the Darkened Soul, Depth Psychology and Philosophical Practices (2013), C.G. Jung L’Opera al Rosso (2016); “The Quest for Meaning after God’s Death in an Era of Chaos”, M. Stein and Th. Arzt (ed. by), Jung’s Red Book for Our Time. Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions, Vol. 2, (2018); The Psychic Counterpoise to Violence Towards the Human Other (2020).

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About the Author

Gordon Cappelletty holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology in Fresno. He filled the role of clinical director with Mental Health Services of Catawba County and is currently a professor of psychology and Interim Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina.

Romano Màdera is a professor of moral philosophy and philosophical practices at the University of Milano. He is a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). He is the founder of Philo, School of Philosophical Practices, and SABOF (Society for Biographic Analysis Philosophically Oriented). Among his books are La carta del senso (2012), Una Filosofia per l’anima (2013) partly translated into English as Approaching the Navel of the Darkened Soul, Depth Psychology and Philosophical Practices (2013), C.G. Jung L’Opera al Rosso (2016); The Quest for Meaning after God’s Death in an Era of Chaos, M. Stein and Th. Arzt (ed. by), Jung’s Red Book for Our Time. Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions, Vol. 2, (2018); The Psychic Counterpoise to Violence Towards the Human Other (2020).

Dedication

Dedicated to my wife, Jennifer, without whose love and support in permitting me six weeks of writing in Italy, this would not have been possible.

Copyright Information ©

Gordon Cappelletty and Romano Màdera 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Cappelletty, Gordon and Màdera, Romano

Into the Maelstrom

ISBN 9781649795724 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781649795731 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022909899

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

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New York, NY 10005

USA

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Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the assistance of many people who helped with the proofing of the manuscript and who provided suggestions to improve the readability of the final text. Michelle Curley of Crossroads Counseling provided invaluable assistance with detailed reading and examination of the initial draft. Lili Brown Harrison, former supervisor, colleague, and friend offered her services in the editing of the initial chapters. Laurie Capps, Savanna Dove, Ana Kondratiev, and many other students in my research group also helped find the pesky grammar and spelling errors that plague an author’s work. Finally, a special expression of gratitude to my outstanding teaching assistant, Korbin Little, for her meticulous proofing of the final copy of the manuscript. All of them provided assistance that cannot be measured directly but resulted in a much better product.

Introduction

Maelstrom: a powerful often violent whirlpool sucking in objects within a given radius.

—Merriam Webster

Beginning from high school, students who take courses in writing are told to write about what you know. That is why the best authors write from personal experience and there is a certain degree of autobiography in what they write. In the sciences, however, we are told to distance ourselves from what we study. Particularly in psychotherapy, much emphasis has been placed on emotionally distancing oneself from one’s subject matter. This is the problem with many books on psychology and philosophy; the authors do not write about a topic on which they have had any direct or indirect experience. They write in a vacuum, and for that reason, their books come across as shallow or esoteric, inapplicable to the true problems facing humanity. Their books are written for and read by other academics and thus fail to have any impact on the world outside the university.

This is not to say that one must directly experience, for example, drug addiction in order to study or write about drug addiction. Experience can come in many forms from directly treating drug addicts to living with someone suffering from drug addiction to actually having suffered through addiction oneself. All these direct experiential points of view are valid and useful in giving a broader picture of what is involved in drug abuse.

In addition to the direct experience of a phenomenon, the indirect experience can be just as valuable in providing a needed perspective on a topic. A certain distance allows one to view our subject matter from a non-emotive perspective and permits a perspective that one cannot achieve when one is directly in the middle of a phenomenon.

All of this is to say that reading, thinking, and meditating on a topic are not enough to be able to meaningfully write about it.

I remember well the day my father took his life four days before my birthday on 15 July 1994. He was just 59 years old at the time, and I was recovering from a severe accident that occurred while I was skydiving, a sport I had taken up in my mid-30s. It was a year of multiple crises for me, not the least of which was the fact that I could not attend the funeral of my father as my accident prevented me from traveling the distance from California, where I lived, to Pennsylvania, where my father was to be buried. A psychology clinic that I had started was failing, in part because of my accident and in part because of funding cuts resulting from a state budget crisis. The resulting financial crisis and difficulty paying my bills occupied what resources I could muster. My son and I were estranged for many reasons ending in his departure for New Hampshire to be with his mother, my ex-wife. A bone infection had set in where my femur had been shattered into a thousand small pieces. The orthopedic surgeon said that it was like a bowl of cornflakes inside my leg. Following the resolution of the bone infection, the titanium rod that held my leg together had snapped in two causing further injury to the tissue and the need for another expensive surgery to replace it. And now, my father had died four days before my birthday with the year barely half over, and I could not grieve and say goodbye properly.

I also remember a conversation I had with my grandmother, the mother of my father, a woman who had buried three husbands and who had now buried her second child. Following the surgery and recuperation, I finally managed to travel to Pennsylvania to visit the grave of my father, take some flowers, and permit myself an opportunity to grieve. Sitting in the living room of her home, I looked at her and said: You know, I would like one year, just one year, when I didn’t have to deal with a major crisis in my life.

I will never forget her response as I sat on the sofa and felt sorry for myself. I am over 80 years old, she began, and I have not had one year, not one, that I would want to live over in its entirety. Every year has had good things, and it has had bad things, but there is not one year that I would do over completely.

I was a clinical psychologist dealing with the traumas and emotional pain of my clients, and I had never stopped to think about the universality of the suffering, pain, or crises that confront us. That one conversation with my grandmother brought home to me the nature of the human condition and the universality of life crisis. I returned to the classroom a few weeks later and asked a room full of graduate students to raise their hands if they had never experienced a severe crisis in their lives. Not one hand went up. I then rephrased the question and asked, again by a simple show of hands, who had not experienced a crisis in the past year. Again, no hands went up. I then shortened the time frame to the past six months, and two or three hands were raised. When shortened even further to the past three months, more than half of the class raised their hands. The point of sharing this is to emphasize what the conversation with my grandmother had taught me: there is no such thing as a crisis-free life or even a crisis-free year.

As is true of many books, the title of this book was chosen to serve as a metaphor for the subject matter. Those who experience a crisis are thrown into a whirlwind of emotions, thoughts, and experiences that disorient and put one off-balance. As with a maelstrom where everything within a radius gets sucked into the whirlwind, so too in a crisis, everything and everyone a person holds close get sucked into the turbulent storm of the crisis. As is also true of a maelstrom, there is a point at the center where there is calm and tranquility just as in every period of crisis, and there are moments when the crisis seems to have resolved, only to return again with winds and rain that knock one off-balance anew. The myth of crisis as tempest is not new to me as there are many references in literature, myth, and even psychology to the emotional storm created by the crisis. As with a tempest, there is often the build-up to the crisis, a period of time in which the clouds gather; the temperature lowers; and the winds begin to blow. There is then the crisis itself, the storm of intense feelings and disorganized thought with behaviors that seem completely out of control. And then, after every tempest, there is a period of calm, renewed energy, and a sense of relief, and also the need to clean up, reorganize, and repair the damage caused by the storm.

As with a series of storms, sometimes the crisis seems like it will never end. There is one storm after another, and a person never seems to be able to exit the whirlwind that then becomes their life. After the storms finally pass, everything is changed and different, and nothing remains the same. So, it is with a major life crisis—one leaves the maelstrom of crisis a different person, sometimes better able to cope with the next one, sometimes less able to handle the difficulties faced by future ones, but never the same.

In this book, my co-author and I propose to look at crisis theory, the why and how of crises, and the reasons that they are universal events that occur not only at some rather predictable periods but also at some very unpredictable periods in life. From the crisis of birth, around which there is much controversy as to its existence and significance, to the crisis of death, which is undoubtedly universal as every human being sooner or later experiences the death of a loved one and faces one’s own death, our lives are defined in large part by the crises we have experienced and the ways in which we have resolved or not resolved them, as the case may be. Our identities are determined to a large extent by the crises that we have faced in the past, molding and shaping our view of ourselves and our relationships with others. Some individuals exit the maelstrom of a crisis with apparent ease while other individuals seem to live lives going from one crisis to another never fully exiting the maelstrom and never fully experiencing the calm after the multiple storms that seem to continually confront them.

What is the reason for the differences between the crises we experience and our reactions to them? One answer is that individual differences play a role, but this is a non-sequitur and a non-explanation when we want to know the reason. Of course, we are all different with our own unique ways of perceiving, understanding, and responding to the world in which we live. In teaching, I stand in front of the same blackboard for all, say the same words that everyone in the room hears in the same tone of voice with the same inflections and the same expression on my face. Yet some students leave the lecture with a firm understanding, and others are more confused than before they came into the room. Some of my students consider me to be brilliant while others think that I am the stupidest professor ever to disgrace a classroom, even though all receive the same information in the same manner. What is it about people that makes their perception and reaction different even when confronted with the same set of stimuli within the same environment? This is clearly the psychological attitude to be addressed in this book.

Another answer to the question is that people’s biological responses differ. Again this is a non-answer as it leads to the question of what is it that is biologically different. The answers, such as chemical imbalance, bad neurological wiring, and structural differences, don’t suffice on their own. The questions of how much of the chemical one needs to be in balance, what is the difference between good and bad neurological wiring, and precisely what role the neurological structures play in the perception of and response to a crisis are never fully addressed. The monoamine hypothesis in explaining depression and the dopaminergic hypothesis in explaining schizophrenia remain just that, hypotheses with little actual empirical support to sustain them. Since the 1990s, research has revealed significant limitations in the monoamine hypothesis with severe criticism coming from the psychiatric community (Hirschfeld, 2000), with the dopamine hypothesis receiving similar criticism due to a lack of evidence to support the idea that symptoms of psychosis are caused by excessive dopamine activity in the brain (Moncrieff, 2009). Just because medications used to treat depression or psychosis raise serotonin levels or decrease dopamine, respectively, does not necessarily mean that these levels are the cause of the disturbances.

Another line of responding is that the difference in individual reaction to the crisis precipitant is due to differences in resources available to the person. Clearly, an individual who has more money in the bank is going to respond differently to a financial demand than a person without money. While valuable in explaining the responses of people with vastly different resources, this line of reasoning does not explain why two people with similar resources respond in quite different ways, nor does it explain the observation that a person with limited resources quite often responds more adaptively than one with more resources. It also does not address the question of what resources a person really needs in a given situation to produce a given resolution to a specific crisis, and how one should or should not go about accessing or obtaining those resources.

Then there is the response of individual personality characteristics. One person’s personality is different from another’s, as goes the explanation, and this is the reason that they respond differently. Again, this begs the question of what are the optimal personality characteristics needed to survive a major life crisis. How do these characteristics interact with the specifics of the crisis to affect an individual’s ability to move through the crisis period?

There are a number of theoretical models that have been used to explain the crisis response. As we will discuss in a later section, theory is a helpful guide only, and one should not limit one’s responses to slavishly following a particular theoretical model. Thus, while this book will consider many different theoretical viewpoints, we will not settle on a single pedagogical approach examining all extant theoretical perspectives. Rather the purpose of this book is to integrate the different perspectives into a comprehensive understanding of the crisis response. While we will weave in chaos theory throughout our examination, this theory is more of a way to bridge the larger, more formal theoretical systems developed in psychology and medicine. Chaos theory helps us understand the processes proposed by the grand theories and connects them in a way that cannot be done from within this or that theoretical framework.

Ultimately, underlying the focus of this work is the view that crises are not necessarily bad, should not be reflexively avoided, and are in fact necessary for growth and development. The human desire for order, organization, rules, and structure maintains the status quo and prevents progression to more adaptive forms. This is not to say that either my co-author or I believe that we should intentionally create debilitating crises in our clients or our own lives, but rather that when a crisis occurs, we should not rush to mute it, eliminate it, or otherwise be dismissive of it. Crises are a necessary part of life, and we should jump into the maelstrom when we find ourselves in the middle of a crisis situation. The resulting chaos offers us an opportunity for growth, a chance to reorganize our lives, and move forward as more mature, competent, and capable individuals.

This book is also not a how-to book on crisis resolution. There are literally hundreds of such works currently available with Amazon.com listing more than 700 books that have the words crisis response in the title. When I explain to people the topic of this book, one of the first questions that they inevitably ask is how does one jump into the maelstrom and resolve a particular crisis. My response is always that I do not know. Each crisis is unique even though many crises producing situations are universal. While this sounds contradictory on the surface, each individual has his or her own personality, set of resources, point of view, and biological peculiarities which set them apart from others. There is no do A, then B, then C formula to working with human beings in the area of mental and emotional functioning. After more than 30 years as a psychologist and psychotherapist, I have thrown away all of my books espousing manualized treatment. As a young psychologist, I relied on them to guide me in the wilderness of the psyche, but over time, I have come to see the standardized approaches as both inadequate and overly constricting. There is, therefore, no fixed formula for dealing with a crisis or resolving the ongoing, ever-evolving crises that some people face.

Rather this is a book about the nature and structure of crises. The subtitle of the book is Toward a Theory of Chaos and Crisis to indicate that my co-author and I do not entertain such narcissistic thoughts as to think that we can come up with the theory of crises. Rather we write this book as an attempt to integrate multiple stains of thinking; some of them diametrically opposed on the surface, into a comprehensive view of the crisis phenomenon as applied to individual human behavior. The book is best seen in the trends of others that attempt to integrate physical, mental, social, and transcendent aspects of human existence into an understanding of the problems that face us all.

This book offers a perspective that is useful for those dealing with crisis situations, whether working through one’s own crisis or helping others to resolve theirs. The book offers no concrete instructions, but what it does do is to help clarify and advance one’s work in the field of crisis resolution. We live in an age filled with gimmicks and techniques; our shared belief is that if we can find the right levers to push, the correct combination of techniques, and medication, then everything will be fine. The education of psychotherapists has evolved to a prescriptive approach based more on diagnosis and categorization than on understanding the problems faced by our clients. So-called evidence-based practice and best-practice paradigms suggest that for every identified problem, there is a specific solution or set of solutions that can be prescribed, much like the prescription of antibiotics for strep throat. The emphasis on evidence-based and empirically validated practice has led students of psychotherapy and counseling to believe that diagnosis A requires therapeutic practice B and little else.

Nothing could be further from the truth. A statement I have made frequently to my students is that when one fully understands the patient, any technique will work; however, if one does not fully understand one’s patient, no technique will work. If a therapist fully understands the crisis confronting the client, both from within and without, then any ethical technique can be easily adapted to fit the needs of the individual. If one does not have this understanding, then the technique is doomed to fail no matter how many times it has worked with others. The primary rule of any good psychotherapist is, therefore, first to understand and then to treat. Written jointly by a clinical psychologist (Cappelletty) and an ethical philosopher (Màdera), the aim of this book is to bring together psychological and philosophical lines of thinking and provide guidance to both the novice and seasoned therapists on fulfilling the first part of this primary rule: the necessity of first understanding as completely as possible the crisis that confronts the client and the crises that confront us all.

Part I

A Theory of Crisis

Chapter 1

The Universality of Crisis

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

—Orson Wells

The Third Man

For more than 30 years, I have been a psychologist, psychotherapist, and educator. During this period, I have learned three things about crises. The first, as I mentioned in the introduction, is that they are universal: there is no one who has not and does not experience crises from time to time. As seen in the question posed by Raniolo (2009) when commenting on Bion’s 1948 article, Psychiatry at a Time of Crisis, has there ever been a time when there has not been a crisis? Has there ever been a period that should never be compared to instability and transition? In the 1940s, in the midst of a terrifying world war, Mundy (1947) wrote: The world that we know is piteous with want and with cruelty and with war. It is full of treachery, crime, murder (p. xvii). The sad reality is that these words could equally have been written in reference to Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and dozens of other countries 70 years later in 2017. Individuals, families, and countries seem to leave one crisis only to enter into another within short order. There has never been a period of time without a crisis.

The second point is that crises are very often inevitable and unavoidable. One simply cannot avoid encountering various crises during one’s life. While modern psychology has got better at being able to predict and describe crisis states, we cannot eliminate them from the lives of those who seek our services. Whether the result of a major life transition or an unexpected calamity, crises are often like the hurricane that approaches the coastline of a major city: even though we can predict its arrival and watch its progress, the best we can do is brace ourselves, wait it out, and hope for the best.

The third point is that crises are necessary, even if unwanted, events that drive us forward and motivate us to change. The natural tendency of any system is toward equilibrium, status quo, and stagnation. The 2016 American presidential campaign slogan Make America Great Again really meant: Let’s stop the social change creating the anxiety, fear and discomfort we now feel, and return to an earlier, more easily recognizable and stable system. The presentation of a crisis, no matter the size, adds energy to the system that forces that system to reorganize itself and move forward. Corrente (2009) suggests that we can say, in general, that every phase of life is preceded by and accompanied by one or more elements of crisis and that these elements are at the base of every major change. Crisis, in his point of view, is of vital importance in the change process in fostering and advancing vital resources and creative capacity. In fact, he writes that creative change cannot happen without first experiencing the crisis. Every crisis is at one and the same time the generator of both new systems of consciousness as well as social and cultural upheaval (Vigneri, 2007). Crisis creates chaos, but out of that chaos comes a reorganization, order and a renewed sense of energy and urgency.

An example of the above is the crisis that was created