Pathos and Spiritus

by David Tresemer, PhD

The Diverse Needs for Counseling: Response to Pathos

A chapter from The Counselor …. As If Soul and Spirit Matter, published by SteinerBooks

Counselors need to be aware of the full spectrum of needs, even if they can’t serve every situation. We can picture the wide range of human problems, concerns, and ailments along a dimension of pathology—from -ology, or logos (pattern), of pathos (passion, suffering, the human drama): pattern of suffering. We are all entangled in the pathos of life to some extent or another. Too much pathos makes us dysfunctional; too little means we are not prodded to grow. A counselor joins in another’s pathos through em-pathy.

Antipathy means that the counselor feels revulsion for the client’s pathos—thus anti (against) pathy (pathos); a reaction of rejection has been triggered in the counselor that the counselor should explore. Sympathy means that the counselor identifies with the pathos of the client; the counselor loses his or her Self. Empathy means that the counselor understands through resonance what the client is going through, as on a parallel track, yet does not drown in it along with the client. In every case, the counselor observes and feels the client’s pathos, with empathy the healthiest approach.

The pathos of human experience can range from little to large, creating a kind of Pathos Scale:

The popular Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM, version IV, Axis V) features a parallel scale that it calls the GAF, for Global Assessment of Functioning: High on the Pathos Scale means low functioning. The DSM-5 uses the World Health Organization (WHO) Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0. These continua are bumpy and not smooth, just like pathos, just like life.

The writhing knots of pathos grind their constrained and painful cycles over and over in our lives. We respond to pathos with maturity, with pathology, or with both. For counseling, we can observe a series of situations escalating along the continuum of a Pathos Scale, understood by the way the human being responds to pathos:

This is obviously simplified, yet helps us understand the continuum of pathos. At the left end, at little pathos, people have no problems, and do not seek counseling; they simply live their lives. Those who have simple problems seek mentoring from friends and relatives; an aunt or uncle becomes a helpful mentor; a helpful piece of advice keeps them going for a long time. Those who have more problems (higher on the Pathos Scale) seek to work with those nagging issues through personal growth, motivational workshops, trainings of all sorts, ropes-courses, self-help books, and life-coaching. These problems can appear as large obstacles in the road of life, but amenable to change: one life-coach training site advertises a course, “How to Change Your Life in Forty-Five Minutes.” At this lower level of pathos, such a claim may not be ridiculous. Rhonda Byrne’s book and movie, The Secret, sold many millions of copies; its formula of positive thinking, in the tradition of Emile Coué and Ernest Holmes, can be very helpful at this level of pathos. At this end of the Pathos Scale, simple fix-its can sometimes work large changes.

Further to the right, “The Top 3 Ways to Fix your Love Life” ceases to be adequate. One finds more serious problems that require better-trained counselors who can use methods such as Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). It makes a difference if the counselor is thumbing through a manual (in their minds or, as has been occasionally reported, in the session), or is meeting a human soul present in the room. Though Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotional Behavior Therapy (father to the three methods just mentioned) can sometimes seem reductionist in its application—“All you’ve been saying is merely Irrational Belief #5”—Ellis in person was dynamic, funny, intuitive, and confronting. Indeed, he was able to make the “irrational beliefs” come alive, and accomplish great transformations in just a few sessions. Therapists with a formulaic approach can be effective with those with less pathos. Greater pathos demands a more mature counselor.

The person with more pathos—more serious problems—seeks ongoing psychotherapy, suggesting issues more deeply imbedded in the psyche. Even Martin Seligman suggested that learned helplessness took many retrainings—in his studies with traumatized dogs up to sixty—to undo.

As pathos becomes more severe, medications may be brought in. One of the issues of our time is that drugs are brought in far too early, at a level of pathos where the problem could simply be endured, rather than drugged. As Robert Whitaker has documented, the drugs drive people more deeply into pathos when they needn’t have gone there. Whitaker calls this an epidemic of iatrogenic (doctor-caused) mental illness, a monumental failure of medicine whose impacts will increase over the coming years. In the terms of this continuum, powerful drugs may push the user up the Pathos Scale. There may be appropriate times when medication must be used, as in intractable schizophrenia, or to help stabilize a person in order to allow for their personal development through therapy. With that said, there is a rampant over-use through prescriptions and self-medication in the world due to the influence of pharmaceutical corporations. There is also the cultural push toward immediate gratification and numbing from any pain. In the coming years, we must ready ourselves to care for the potential that there will be many thousands of people impaired by over-use of medications.

For the most serious levels of pathos, the human being has to be contained and held much more strongly. Increased suffering can lead to outbreaks of violence against self and others. Institutions, from psychiatric hospitals to prisons, have been set up by society to deal with those suffering high pathos.

Each of these levels of pathos requires a different kind of counseling. Many counselors advertise that they can meet any human being and address any problem, but in truth they cannot. Each of these levels on a Pathos Scale requires a different understanding of the human being and different techniques.

A common assumption in counseling psychology is that we must move the client’s Pathos-meter from right to left, from high pathos to less pathos, from suffering to comfort. We assume that our duty is to enable the pursuit of happiness—stated as a right, along with life and liberty, in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America—indeed, to maximize happiness! But is this the best goal?

Spiritus and Pathos

To understand anthroposophic psychology in relation to a Pathos Scale, another dimension becomes very helpful, that of Spiritus—low on the scale meaning less developed capacities of soul and spirit, and higher on the scale meaning more highly developed capacities of soul and spirit. Moving vertically accomplishes the various steps of human development—not only to what Erik Erikson called intimacy and generativity, or what Lawrence Kohlberg called post-conventional moral development, or what Sri Aurobindo called self-realization—but further up to what Aurobindo called God-realization, and anthroposophy calls manas, buddhi, and atma. The point here is that there are states of development of Spiritus that are known and described. (Chapters 4 and 5 of The Counselor give other criteria for understanding the development of the human being vertically.)

What happens when we consider a dimension of Spiritus in relation to a dimension of Pathos? In the following, the central horizontal line of the Pathos Scale is exactly as we framed it above. What happens above and below that line, however, differs.

One could easily argue that these shapes should be adjusted this way or that. And certainly there are overlaps and shadings of each approach. However, the essential picture of this diagram yields several realizations.

First, the gradations between types of Pathos along the horizontal middle line, and thus the appropriate types of counseling, do not hold true at all levels of development of Spiritus. Any one technique claimed to be good for every person and every condition yields only a partial solution to symptoms and to the course of maturation.

We don’t have a GAF or WHO Assessment Scale for Spiritus. In truth, you don’t go up and down in Spiritus the same way that you go right and left with your level of suffering. Psychologists can create stress scales to measure right and left. In Spiritus, we often sample many different states all in the same day. This picture depicts the journey of the main mass of one’s individuality, the essential progress of one’s personal development.

Lifting your Spiritus through soul development does not ensure freedom from pathology. Artists, for example, can often have the challenge of high Pathos; because of high development of soul capacities, this Pathos can be brought into constructive expression (documented in Kay Jamison’s amazing book, Touched with Fire). In that top right area—large Pathos and high Spiritus—can be found the lives of heroes and heroines who have braved extreme difficulties and then gone on to motivate others to overcome great adversity (as in David Menasche’s and Janine Shepherd’s stories); while apparently stories of overcoming pathos, the real stories are a growth in Spiritus.

This upper right corner includes the work of the Spiritual Emergence Network, pioneered by Christina Grof and Emma Bragdon. Their approach has been that people with high Spiritus, and undergoing high Pathos, whether temporary or long-term, can become severely dysfunctional. Because their crisis involves maturation of Spiritus, they should not be drugged but rather cared for in a special way to support that development.

For a long time, people have been seeking these highSpiritus experiences, and expect that they come with a higher level of pathos (that is hopefully temporary). Here’s part of a poem from Rumi, writing in the 13th century:

I want that kind of grace from God that, when it hits, I won’t get off the floor for days. And when I finally do stagger into a semblance of poise, I will still need a cane and a shoulder to help me walk, and I will need great patience from any who try to decipher my slurred speech. (1)

Rumi expects the high-Spiritus “peak experience” to bring him high-Pathos. Today these symptoms would warrant medication; for Rumi, that would undermine the thoroughness of the foray into high-Spiritus.

The studies from the pre-drug era (prior to the entry of Thorazine in 1954) showed that the great majority of people who experienced depression or anxiety (or any of the other common debilitating diagnoses, including schizophrenia) self-regulated and rejoined their lives after three to twelve months (this research from Whitaker). These were episodes of higher Pathos on a rough journey to work out a lift in Spiritus.

Anthroposophic psychology has a unique ability to assist those who have attained high development of Spiritus. Every point in this map of Pathos and Spiritus requires a different quality and content of whole-soul conversation to meet the individual along his or her unique path of development. Understanding the journey in terms of the dynamics of soul and spirit assists one to find the appropriate counseling response.

Exclusively cognitive approaches to therapy are more successful with people who have developed their soul capacities to some extent. Those who have developed more in Spiritus veer away from mechanistic models; they become more interested in approaches that recognize soul and spirit in action. A good cognitive psychologist adapts to these differences in development of Spiritus.

Over the millennia, levels of pathos have always ranged from little to large, though some say that times are getting harder. Anthroposophy asserts that Spiritus for the mass of humanity moves upward over the centuries. Though there have always been those advanced in spiritual development, as well as those very little developed, anthroposophy posits that the bulk of humanity is slowly advancing in spiritual development. This has great importance for a counselor’s task in relating to a person in need.

Perhaps the most important revelation of this picture is this: Anthroposophic psychology does not measure success as how far a client moves to the left—diminishing pathos, solving problems, reducing suffering, finding more happiness, adapting more readily to the client’s surroundings. Rather, progress is seen when one lifts in the dimension of Spiritus, the strengthening and realization of soul and spirit, moving upward in this diagram. The world is seen as a school for soul growth, rather than as a vehicle for pleasure. Each moves toward the realization that life is not only about individual happiness, but about a task for each and all (more in chapter 6). Progress is thus seen when soul/spirit realities are integrated into awareness, in this picture when one moves vertically. Horizontal movement becomes less important.

Of course, crippling pathos has to be dealt with, in service of the increasing ability to develop oneself through stages of sophistication of soul and spirit. The counselor helps the client draw nearer the purpose of a single human life, and all human life—and one finds this through the warmth and interaction of love.

David Tresemer, Ph.D., teaches in the certificate program in Anthroposophic Counseling Psychology, and with his wife Lila via the IlluminatedRelationships.com initiative.

The Counselor …. As If Soul and Spirit Matter can be ordered from SteinerBooks or Amazon.

There is more about anthroposophic psychology programs at AnthroposophicPsychology.org.

1 From Daniel Ladinsky (2002). Love Poems from God. New York: Penguin Compass, p. 83.