Philosophical Midwifery with Pierre Grimes

[Music] thinking aloud conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey Mishlove today we are going to explore the topic of philosophical midwifery and with me is the author of the book philosophical midwifery a new paradigm for understanding human problems dr. pierre grimes who is the founder of the american philosophical practitioners association is also the founder of the noetic society based in los angeles he is the author of a number of other books the pocket Pierre and unblocking which is based on the principles of philosophical midwifery it's a practice akin to psychotherapy that takes place within a philosophical milieu welcome Pierre pleasure it's a pleasure once again to be with you so I guess one could say a philosophical practitioner such as yourself is something of a hybrid between a philosopher and a psychotherapist that's correct mm-hmm that's correct and you've been engaged in this practice now for a good thirty years well it started in 1961 with the publication I made I did called Alcibiades and it was a dialogue I wrote featuring Socrates and Alcibiades white characterized as a alcoholic and therefore I explored Alcibiades alcoholic addiction and alcoholism in terms of the roots of how he came to be an alcohol and I wrote it up as a dialogue and I sent it to Dale journal they had a journal at that time studying alcoholism and they were very upset it they wrote me a letter and they said it caused a great deal of difficulty among their territorial board so they sent it to another magazine and that same thing happened there and so they sent it back to the Yale and they said please print it so that's how it got printed okay so that started therefore as an exploration of it when furry mm-hmm and so it's been since 1960 so a little more than its half a century after century yeah little over half a century to be specific well how did you arrive at a term like midwifery I know there's a history there okay see I was involved and study of Plato and classic thought for some time and I had been studying dialogues trying to understand the dynamics of a dialogue and I was going to graduate school in San Francisco this was a 1960 pieman 19 1954 the okay and I needed a job I had a wife and several children and unfortunately and you know you need to eat you know so I was never given enough money to live like a gentleman so I decided I would be having to find work so I went to the public welfare department in San Francisco and they said yeah we'll hire you if you want good job working with alcoholics on Skid Row I said a lot dude I had some people that were alcoholics in my family hmm and so I became a social worker working with alcoholics then they started a rehabilitation center in Redwood City after only just a few months and since I was the only one who was working with specifically with alcoholics and Skid Row they said you go so I became the social worker identified as the counselor and so I would just be at the center and I'd say to the with both my alcoholics tell me about your last drunken which charted out on the black boards that's all they did I said I want to understand you guys I don't understand that drunk so I started working with chronic alcoholics they came back periodically and I began seeing patterns or didn't understand why the parent patterns existed when they got a drunk and when they came off a drunk became significant so at this PhD chemist and he was a chronic chronic alcoholic periodic alcoholic and we had we used to have great meetings he'd come back and back so one day we had tried it out his pattern we were saying well now why are you going through the same thing notice you seem to start out just after you've had close to a victory and you end up in a hospital what's going on it's the same thing yeah it's sabotage yes sabotaging himself yeah he said you know what this may not be important he's but you know like I keep getting this image an old image of I should know how to talk about it he said my mother used to come out to me and he said you know when I was a kid we used to play football outs and of course in those days we didn't have uniforms or anything like that we just play on the dirt and it was somewhat dangerous and my mother she stood there by the doorway should say something I want you to come home either with your shield or without it they were Greeks that was the old Spartan slogan he said you know I think that's what I'm doing he said after every drunk I'm being carried home on a stretcher I'm coming home on my shield I should do this what but what do you make of your mother he said he said John he's this rather curious he said Ben job she was very busy we had a lot of children she said you know those were the moment she appeared most beautiful to me and caring matter of fact they were the only time I really got that much attention from her at that moment I said oh really what do you make of that he said well that's love that's caring I'm reenacting that at that that moment that great moment I'm acting it out again and again yep I sure that's remarkable mm-hm that became the beginning of philosophical midwifery sure but the term midwifery right I mean the Midwife assists in a birth right right and I gathered that the the the philosopher who was a midwife is giving birth to the soul yes and this is what this is giving birth to the soul yeah but I was also into Proclus in those days yeah and Procol is calls Socrates a midwife they said this is midwifery mm-hmm and I said well that's what I'm doing I'm a midwife yeah so that's where the term philosophical midwifery came out of and then when I worked out the details of it of course then I then discovered it was the same dynamics that occurred in Homer's Iliad hmm but I chose it because I should just mention yes play that we discussed this in a previous interview the story of how Achilles came to a realization of his own pattern and therefore was willing finally to enter into battle and after he had withdrawn so so that's the reference to Delhi yes yeah and if people want more detail on that they I will post a link to that interview oh great yeah right yes yes yes and from that I did this dialogue I called Alcibiades and I got published mm-hm and then I didn't realize the significance of it the implications of it for several years and I said to myself here maybe you're a psychology maybe you're really a psychologist really not a philosopher mm-hmm you know so I said I better start over so I packed up the family in San Francisco after I got my degrees and I said I think I'm gonna study psychology the new school of research in New York City's I joined them yep and what I found there was a disaster I found that they didn't know what they were doing we were studying at that time the Minnesota symposium and motivations and they had any classic example we spent our time studying and it was 50 a number of parachuters there were volunteers they were all wired up on all kinds of electronic devices generated to Teslas love it anxiety and they were we rented dollar did dollar than the other guys named Miller and Miller in dollars yes and they had the gradient where you should watch the curve of anxiety or withdrawal and escape approach in a approach and avoidance yes yes and reminds me very much already of my first encounter with clinical psychology good behaviorism I I had a job fresh out of college at a place called the singers own Center in Rockford Illinois prided itself on being 10 years ahead of the times and I lasted six weeks so because what happened is that the parachute is by every indication they were wired in all variety of ways their level of anxiety seds xscape but they continued up the ladder into the plane and jumped as a gentleman your theory is false they should have withdraw there should not have gotten on the plane in Hoover what are you teaching they said oh no no no this is a good study I said of course it's a good study it shows that your theories are false while that ended my career at the new school of social research I decided the best thing to do is to look for a teaching job doing philosophy and I'd spend my time doing philosophy well I understand exactly where you're coming from because one might naively assume especially with a background in philosophy that psychologists are interested in the psyche and it turns out they're not very bitter they got upset at my at my my views I said well gentlemen I might as well leave they want to claim the name psyche in their name psychology but they really don't want to have anything to do with it for except recently now they're beginning to look at the psyche but but for the most part they prefer to be thought of as behavioral scientists you know that's very sad yeah and it's true they act that they started aping so physics physics Newtonian physics yeah and empirical methods and the psyche is not in that realm there was in societies in the realm of the mind and so I decided well the thing to do is do my own studies and continue so I got a position in Southern California and I started exploring problems and out of that came a club who started a club and then the school got upset with having a club so we moved a lot to campus and start at the noetic Society and that's how it began but the basic idea is I gather is that you use the Socratic method in order to uncover what you call the path logos meaning false ideas we have about ourselves and when people are conscious of what had previously been unconscious with regard to the their very being yes then then there's some movement so there's growth most of us see then the stage came on I was looking then at the need just explore daydreams now daydreams are the same thing except for one factor there are five kinds of daydreams I like the tangent daydreams that when anyone who's involved in something that's that takes their attention and their focus of their energies and they need to devote themselves very carefully to the content of something especially an intellectual work anything that interrupts that is it as a tangent mm-hm that tangent is likely to contain an image of themselves or a daydream my goal then is to get people to write down their daydream and only ask a few questions such as describe the first moment you have the daydream where you have an image of yourself examine yourself I don't need to examine your daydream you can examine the day train yourself and see that what is implicit in that image is the drama of the daydream what's significant is when you allow it to go its full course you wake up to recognize it's false because it's a failure if that always failures in tangent daydreams old I should not occur why is it you identified therefore with the false image of yourself you don't realize that that is your false image of yourself because you identify with it immediately when it occurs you allow it to play itself out therefore now that we know we now can identify your false image of the self let's see if we can discover its origin now why is it a dream necessarily a false image couldn't it also be simply the mind scanning for potential problems so that they can be avoided that might be but that was that's not a tensioned daydream okay I could be other kinds of daydreams and that is true I say but tangent daydreams you see you're pursuing something you love you know you're pursuing anytime you pursue to anything that you eleven you think of meaningful that's when you get your block that's the nature of a problem okay and philosophical my drive for you you can anticipate whenever you're doing what you truly love and what is meaningful to you you'll get a block in other words we're coming back to the issue of self-sabotage yes okay that's essential and I philosophical midwifery mmm-hmm therefore you can anticipate it you can look forward to it and now you can ask questions such as all you have to do is describe the state of mind that you experience at that moment when that self-sabotage occurred describe it then see whether you can look for analogous circumstances to that state of mind not an association but a similarity with that state of mind look for earlier and earlier events of it mm-hmm it's worthwhile even if you get four or five as you retreat back into your earlier life look for the earliest one then you'll see it will occur in an event where that's where it began and invariably what happens at that time is that you were free open alive find experience of reality beautiful and the imposition comes down upon you and therefore you give it up what's interesting though is that if you're doing something that is very creative you'll give up your creativity you know and therefore you suffer that loss and that produces anger within you you have that right subject to some injustice and that Fester's the wound as it were and you're angry but you can't show it so you look for some other situation where you can then project it upon and that becomes your life so maybe why free is to try to trace it back but we go further we say now look here it's important therefore for you to tell me what you think is most important to you that you gave up go back to it go back to your most most important challenge take it on and let's see how well you can do it and master it mm-hmm in that mastery you'll discover naturally the block that will block you the self-sabotage will occur then we again ask the same questions what are they can you please put those that experience into words where where are examples of it you'll find them in several places you go back to the earliest one you try to reconnect reconstruct that event so you can see the dynamics of it and then relate it to the present mm-hmm midwifery it sounds very much like psychotherapy to be honest but why but but why don't they do it mm-hmm well a lot of psychotherapy does involve uncovering early childhood trauma but they don't link it they don't link it to such a meaningful event yeah they they are pursuing anxiety we are exploring anger well and I know in psychotherapy it's often either term you here is catharsis is like once you get in touch with that anger and express it the ideas you you have had a catharsis and the problem will kind of dissipate say that's true but you can always find several episodes the important thing is to find its origin yeah not to express it feeling by the way expressing it is very good for the person they feel good we want to go to its origin not to its manifestation yeah that's just a central difference no and you do you see the origin as an early childhood trauma or something else but there's never a trauma uh-huh you don't call it a trauma it's not a drop and one way it's not a trauma because there's no punishment there's no injury inflicted the the parent is seeing of this child in an ideal stage mm-hm and they're imposing a restriction upon it because the parent views the ideal state is this is mischief yes yes a potentially mistress yes and dangerous to them yeah but the state itself as a child is not a trauma enjoying the mischievous it's wonderful mischief yes and therefore it's not a trauma but often the parent may may discipline the child I mean it could be brutal need not be okay may not be at all yeah but I mean in my role and has to be as a withdrawal of effect or the parent might simply say you're you're a bad person well no look at them the story of the first story I mentioned of the mother who stood in the doorway and looks beautiful and tells the child I wanted you to come home either with your shield or on it mm-hmm she looks beautiful yeah so it's not necessarily traumatic it's not true my head well but it could be well I would say the number of situations that were traumatic are rare oh now that's very interesting because I mean the conventional view in psychology I think these is is that early childhood trauma is far more common than we ever thought and that almost every psychopathology can be traced to one you see from that event from the early event the parent may be so angered at the child repeating these up episodes they may in fact inflict at some kind of injury upon the child yeah that's not the same thing that will be an example where they the child is angry or in fear Oh fear produces anxiety this is not fair yeah you're really not delving much into the area of let's say sexual abuse physical abuse emotional abuse by the parent mm-hmm you're looking at something more subtle yes yes you see there are times when I have explored where a child may have gone through some sexual abuse right but invariably what we're looking at is why did the why did the person take advantage of the child because the child appears to them most beautiful and open and we have the same dynamic I see but those if I were to make us an statement in terms of how many out of how many sexual traumas the child knows what went on they're angry at that they fear it they fear it's recurrent that's not the same thing as as discovering the false people why is the child from that event get a false belief this is very important so in the scenes we're talking about where they were doing something that was very beautiful to them very meaningful to them they don't understand why the parents suddenly turned against them they have to walk away saying there must be something wrong with me right but they can't believe that their parents are trying to block them from a meaningful experience they don't have the age and the intelligence yet to make that judgment that's so they blame themselves that blaming themselves the characterize themselves in a certain way it's a false image the result and that what you call the top the logo half the logos right now and I love that term path a logo speak i lates to a term everybody is heard of the logos yes yes and the logos seems to be practically the opposite of the path of Christ the method of analysis the logos wishes we use the same questions in the same way always no no need to vary it except minor circumstances but essentially the same questions are always going to be asked which is what the same way we would used so far say let's see you were trying to achieve your goal oh and you were blocked can you put that in words yes what was it like what did you feel there follows our microphones yeah what did you feel at that time oh you get a description of that where did you have that description where did you describe that in your past oh oh you have several events let's look at each one by the sooner or later we're gonna have to go for the earliest one oh yes we will mm-hmm always the silence so if I understand you correctly the logos also in this process it becomes like the inner wisdom of the person the kind of one might say higher self it's always there it's always there mm-hmm that's always there it's remarkable that it's there and it's remarkable that such understanding can free them of their problems Wow like realization is a result of coming to grips with something that occurred you that you didn't understand therefore understanding is primary for your growth well then that means that life is meaningful that means you cannot block someone's growth without injuring them for the rest of their life yeah but that's really that's why we should save criminals that's why we should save these people who are terrorists we should indeed say look here let's see what made you what you are so we can then try to understand this mm-hmm that's reason that's making irrational lives yeah but there's also the issue of how we lock ourselves Oh whenever we block ourselves see that's what we do whatever we learned we apply to ourselves we become a teacher of ourselves we become our worst teacher of ourselves because we're imitating a past teacher oh I always tell the people I work with if you don't solve your problem don't worry you'll do it to your child and of course no parent really wants to do that but the the antidote that seems to be inner work yes see I got the first glimpse of this myself when I my first couple of years of marriage I'm I son Peter was on her tricycle we lived in San Francisco on it was I went to the UH pastor UH one of the walk ups and I got home and I was watching him he didn't see I was home I've always walking up the septa status and he's going back and forth on his tricycle over a great where the hot air came without the keys of the apartment and I was watching him and I kept watching him I didn't know why I was watching him I saw I was absorbed in it and I screamed at him I never screamed at him before I should yelled at him what the hell are you doing and I didn't know why I was doing it wasn't I carried that for a long long time saying hey Pierre you know you don't understand yourself because here's the kid you love and look what you're doing you're scaring the hell out of him what for he's riding a tricycle over a great you see then later I could see he was really in an ideal state having a great time freedom and himself and I was worried about that state allowing that state to perpetuate itself in to continue and maybe even deepen her and I wanted to protect him and I didn't realize any of that was true until another 10 15 years down the road you were trying to protect him from his own best nature yes yes and I carried that important insight for every parent yes yes yes well Pierre Grimes once again once again a very profound and meaningful time together I look forward to seeing you often in the future I know we'll have a lot to talk about very good and I'm sure our viewers will appreciate it as well thank you for being with me I had to thank you for being with us thank you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove

Views: 8,373

Rating: 4.97193 out of 5

Keywords: Pierre Grimes, Jeffrey Mishlove, Proclus, psychotherapy, Socratic dialogue

Id: Lzb9v_wEQzQ

Length: 31min 12sec (1872 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2017