Wild Mind. Bill Plotkin
have unintentionally cramped our abilities to grow whole and to fully mature. The agenda of mainstream psychotherapy has been, from its beginnings, remarkably limited and, consequently, limiting. What if, for example, our primary human need and opportunity is not to endlessly attend to our emotional wounds and the eradication of perceived psychological disorders but rather to fathom and flesh out our natural human wholeness and to embody this integral bounty as a gift to others and our world?
Conventional Western psychology has focused on pathology rather than possibility and participation, and this renders it incomplete… and in many ways obsolete.5
In Western culture, we’ve enclosed ourselves within continually mended fences of excessive safety, false security, and shallow notions of “happiness,” when all the while the world has been inviting us to stride through the unlocked gate and break free into realms of greater promise and possibilities. Our psychotherapy-fashioned fences have affirmed our flaws and failures and corralled us within psychosocial prisons of our own making. Our mainstream educational and religious institutions likewise have suppressed our human potential and magnificence, or at least failed to evoke and foster our brilliance and virtuosity, our capacity to truly mature and to help make our world a better place.6
OUR INNATE HUMAN RESOURCES
Our human psyches possess, as capacities, a variety of astonishing resources about which mainstream Western psychology has little to say. By uncovering and reclaiming these innate resources, shared by all of us by simple virtue of our human nature, we can more easily understand and resolve our intrapsychic and interpersonal difficulties as they arise. We need not be as dependent as we have been on the psychological, social, and professional resources of others — clergy and counselors, family and friends, psychotherapists and psychiatrists — or on the neurological reconfiguration services of psychopharmacological chemicals, whether prescribed or elective.
The alleviation of personal troubles is, of course, important to all of us. But the significance and relevance of our innate psychological resources — largely unrecognized, unvalued, and uninventoried by Western psychology and culture — go well beyond the alleviation of personal troubles. Our untapped inner resources are also essential to the flowering of our greatest potentials, to the actualization of our true selves, and to the embodiment of the life of our very souls. These natural faculties are what we must cultivate in order to actively protect and restore our planet’s ecosystems and to spark the urgently needed renaissance of our Western and Westernized cultures. And these innate human resources are precisely those that enable each of us to identify the unique genius and hidden treasure we carry for the world — and, in this way, to participate fully and consciously in the evolution of life on Earth.
These resources — which I call the four facets of the Self, or the four dimensions of our human wholeness — wait within us, but we might not even know they exist until we discover how to access them, cultivate their powers, and integrate them into our everyday lives. Reclaiming these essential human capacities of the Self ought to be the highest priority in psychology, education, religion, medicine, and leadership development. Doing so empowers people to wake up, rise up, and become genuine agents of cultural transformation — and, in the bargain, experience the most profound fulfillment of a lifetime.
The recognition and embrace of these inherent human strengths, capacities, and sensibilities turn much of Western psychology on its head. Our entire approach to understanding and quickening human potential and addressing personal problems shifts radically.
For example, many of the behavioral patterns that mainstream psychology labels as psychopathologies (such as anxiety, depression, manias, phobias, personality disorders, and the tendency to hear or see things other people don’t) are not necessarily problems in themselves. How do we know when they are and when they’re not? What if most actual pathologies are primarily symptoms of underdeveloped psychological resources — inborn capacities of the Self that await cultivation within everyone? Psychological symptoms may best be relieved not by directly trying to eradicate them, impede them, or mask them but rather by developing our innate resources, the unavailability of which may be the primary reason these symptoms appeared in the first place. Perhaps we exhibit psychological symptoms not so much because we’re dis-ordered but because we’re deficient in our embodiment of wellness, health, or wholeness.
When we eliminate symptoms without cultivating wholeness, we still have an unwell, unwhole, or fragmented psyche that will soon enough sprout new symptoms that express, in yet another way, the lack of wholeness.
Here’s an analogy from ecology: When an ecosystem has been damaged — say, from logging, overgrazing, or chemical-dependent mono-crop agriculture — and then you leave it alone, invasive species typically show up and take over. If you then attempt to simply suppress or eliminate the invasives — whether through pesticide application or heroic weeding — you’re not strengthening the ecosystem but rather merely suppressing a symptom called “weeds.” In contrast, if you tend the health of the ecosystem — for example, by improving soil quality or planting native species — the invasives find a less suitable landing site and the ecosystem is more quickly restored to its natural and mature wholeness. Likewise, when we tend the well-being of our human psyches — by improving our social and ecological “soil” and cultivating the “native species” of the Self — there is less opportunity for the fragmented or wounded elements of our psyches to take over; the psychological “space” is already occupied by the facets of a more fully flourishing being. We’ve placed the emphasis on promoting health and wholeness rather than on (merely) suppressing pathology and fragmentedness.
We can douse our psyches with pharmaceutical pesticides and thera- peutically weed them, but a much better approach would be to enhance our psychological, cultural, and ecological soil and to cultivate the capacities of our native human wholeness.
A second limiting assumption of conventional Western psychology — in addition to the idea that the symptom is the problem rather than an indication of a problem — is that our difficulties are solely or primarily a result of troubles within individual psyches (or, even worse, within individual brains).7 But in recent decades, we’ve come to understand that our psychological health relies profoundly on the health of the world in which we are embedded — the psychosocial well-being of our families, the maturity and diversity of our human communities, and the vitality of our natural environments. Indeed, the very meaning of the phrase psychological health is interpersonal and ecological and cannot be coherently reduced to something merely subjective, internal, or neurological. Behavioral patterns that some might perceive as psychological disorders are often understandable and natural reactions to a disordered world. Most personal difficulties are symptoms of problems in our relationships, families, societies, and ecosystems.
When a large proportion of people in a given culture have significant psychological troubles, as is demonstrably the case in the Western world today, these people are not to blame. Their culture is. And yet their culture is constituted by the collective actions of its members. It is the responsibility of all capable individuals to help make their culture whole and vital. Those who are most capable in this way are those who are most whole in themselves.
How can we most effectively grow whole and participate in the revitalization of the whole? This book offers an answer.
In these pages, I introduce a map of psychological wholeness, a map that is nonarbitrary and comprehensive precisely because it’s rooted in nature’s own map of wholeness. The Nature-Based Map of the Psyche serves as a guide to becoming fully human by cultivating the four facets of the Self and discovering both the limitations and the gifts of our wounded, fragmented, and shadowed subpersonalities. This map of the psyche has been in development since the 1980s and has been field-tested and refined by psychologists, counselors, life coaches, educators, clergy, parents, initiation guides, and leaders of wilderness rites in their work with thousands of people of all ages.
For those of you who are psychotherapists, philosophers, professionals in another related field, or simply interested in learning more, I’ve used this book’s endnotes primarily for ideas and references that may be of particular interest to you. Also see the website www.wildmindbook.com,