Part I: The Lens

 

Looking Behind Behaviour

I was thinking about psychoanalysis recently, and initially I understood it as looking behind an action from the lens of an individual's history and experiences, especially those experiences that are somehow pushed into the subconscious but still influence what a person does.

For example, whenever an exam approaches, someone becomes ill. You ask what they feel, and the answer is that they want to score well. Then you ask, what exactly do you feel in those days? Maybe the answer takes some time, but eventually it becomes, "I am not good enough and I have to win approval." Then you start asking where that feeling comes from, and perhaps there was childhood comparison, perhaps there was no basic sense of security, perhaps the person learned that being good enough was necessary for approval.

If you keep going backwards like this, you are not only looking at what the person did. You are trying to understand why that particular thing means what it means to that particular person.

Then I wondered whether I do this myself all the time.

The Problem With Interpretation

Whenever I see some behaviour, I try to look behind it. Why is this person behaving like this? What happened before? What experience could have produced this? What are they not saying? What are they not even aware of?

But if I am always trying to look behind what someone does, how do I know that what I find there actually belongs to them and is not something I have put there myself?

The moment you start interpreting another person, you are also bringing your own framework into it. You are not looking at the person directly. You are looking at them through everything you already believe about how people work.

From Interpreting Others to Interpreting Ourselves

And I think this becomes especially interesting when someone has very strong beliefs about something. You can sometimes see that there is a deep emotional connection to a particular subject even when the person is otherwise very quiet and calm. Their voice changes, their face changes, their physical behaviour changes. Something is clearly happening there.

But what happens when that person then starts thinking about that same subject intellectually?

It could be that their personal experience gives them a deeper understanding of it. But it could also be that they already have a conclusion and are now looking at everything through that conclusion.

And if my framework affects what I notice in another person, then the same problem must apply to the beliefs I already have about the world.

If I already believe something, I can find evidence for it almost everywhere. And the more emotionally connected I am to the belief, the harder it becomes to see the things that don't fit.

But then I had to apply the same thing to myself.

And this made the problem more personal. It is easy to notice this happening in someone else's beliefs, but I have to assume that the same thing can happen in mine.

The Framework I Use

I have my own ideas about relationships, love, responsibility and independence. I think people should take responsibility for their own lives. I think caring for someone does not mean taking responsibility for everything they do. I think you can support someone without trying to steer their life.

But how do I know that I am seeing something about the world and not simply seeing the world through the lens that I have constructed?

I don't think having a lens is avoidable.

If I remove every assumption before thinking, I don't really have anything left with which to think. I need some reference point. I need some idea of what I currently believe in order to question it and develop another idea.

So perhaps the problem is not having a framework. The problem is when the framework becomes rigid and stops being updated by new information.

So I don't think the answer is to get rid of the framework. I need to have an idea, but I also need to be able to say that it might be wrong.

How Much Can We Actually Test?

But if I say that I should keep updating my framework when new information appears, I immediately run into another problem: how much can a person realistically test before accepting an idea?

Suppose someone writes an article saying that mild physical self-harm can help with emotional pain. They say that physical pain is easier to deal with than emotional pain, that it takes attention away from emotional suffering, and that for them it was relieving. They might even argue that it helped them avoid something worse, perhaps even suicidal thoughts.

Now someone else reads this and thinks, "This makes sense. I feel the same thing. Maybe this will help me."

But is it right?

I could tell them to ask what happens over time, whether the behaviour reinforces itself, whether it increases future vulnerability, what risks it introduces, whether there are safer alternatives that perform the same function, what happens when the strategy fails, and what happens when another person imitates it.

But how many people would actually ask all these questions before adopting the idea?

Very few.

People don't normally encounter an idea and then perform a complete analysis of it before accepting it. If something fits their own experience, that can be enough.

When Personal Experience Becomes Evidence

But there is an even deeper problem. Even when a person is not simply accepting someone else's idea, their own experience may not tell them whether the idea is actually true.

Suppose a person is genuinely in emotional distress. They start doing something that they believe helps them. They continue it for some time, and then after some time their emotional distress naturally decreases.

Now the person can look back and say, "That helped me."

And maybe it did.

But there is no way for that person to experience the other version of their life at the same time. They don't know what would have happened if they had not done that thing.

Maybe the practice caused the improvement.

Maybe it only gave temporary relief.

Maybe the person would have recovered anyway.

Maybe something else changed during that period.

Maybe several things happened together.

The correlation can be very strong, but that still doesn't mean the person can distinguish the correlation from causation.

From Experience to Superstition

And once I started thinking about how easily a person can mistake correlation for causation in their own life, superstition seemed like a natural extension of the same problem.

A person does something and then something happens. They repeat it and something happens again. Eventually they start seeing a connection.

Maybe there wasn't one.

Maybe the event would have happened anyway.

Maybe something else caused it.

Maybe it was coincidence.

But the experience is still real. The person really did the thing, and the thing really was followed by the outcome.

So the belief does not necessarily come from stupidity. It can come from a genuine experience that was interpreted as a causal relationship.

When an Interpretation Moves Between People

But once that interpretation is communicated to another person, the problem is no longer only whether the original belief was correct. It becomes a question of what happens when interpretations themselves begin to move between people.

Someone else might recognize their own experience in it and adopt it.

Then someone else does the same thing.

At some point it can become something people simply believe.