Stoic week #2

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015 and have kept a Stoic journal since then. I write for about 10 minutes about a Stoic quotation like If you face hurdles, keep advancing to the best of your ability. Stick to what seems just and right. [Marcus Aurelius, M10.12]. Clearly sometimes the Stoics are just common sense or hoary chestnuts, but slogans are nice to have handy when unruly emotions stir. Be fair. Respect people. You Mr. Irrational Response are but an impression, You M. Feeling Overwhelmed a hobgoblin, You Miz Phantasy a haint. Ain't Nothing To Me.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

Self-control and how to secure it - Paul Dubois

This book by a Bernese neurologist was ably translated from the French by Harry Hutcheson Boyd and released in the USA in 1909. The writing is stunning in its lucidity, a paragon of plain prose. I heard about it from Donald Robertson in a podcast. A copy is available at Internet Archive.

Dr. Dubois theorized that neurasthenia (i.e. anger, anxiety, and depression that make us miserable but don't take us out of action) developed because we are influenced by “our natural and hereditary defects, to our badly directed education, to the vicious influences which act upon us during our entire physical and mental development.” Our mental debility is the result of being too easily influenced by suggestions from the people around us and our unquestioning belief in unhelpful thoughts about ourselves, our actions, our feelings and those of other people.

He’s nothing if not blunt about what his experience doctoring has taught him about people that see themselves as really smart:

He who every day is called upon to interview the mentally diseased who have so-called healthy relatives experiences painful surprises in finding how warped are the minds of individuals who are proud of their intelligence, and belong to recognised social and what are called governing classes.

So much for our leaders and betters but we have to bear and forbear. Dubois was a determinist in the sense that he believed we have to accept the terms and conditions of life on this planet. He advises that we seek education in logic and critical thinking because “… judgment is just what we need in life - a clear view of things, enabling us to foresee the immediate and the future consequences of our acts.” 

Besides following the law, he advised readers to identify and clarify their own values so that they could reach their own conclusions and live authentically, true to their own core values. Similar to thinkers among the Stoics, Buddhists, and Vedantists, he claims appetite, fear, pleasure and distress are the four white-boned demon-passions we have to fight.

The sole liberty that man enjoys is the power to react under the influence of an idea, the ability to obey either the motives of feeling, that is to say, of his passions - or the motives of reason. This obedience is willing, and that is why we call it free, but this willingness depends upon our innate and acquired mentality. To struggle against the temptation of the passions, we require not liberty but a uniformity of moral views that would make the mental balance lean to the right side.

Dr. Dubois frankly admits that at first his patients don’t take kindly to this "forgive the world for being what it is" determinism but using the Socratic method he comes to persuade them. His brand of therapy is called “rational persuasion therapy” because it appealed to the client’s reason. Dr. Dubois also assigned his clients to read Seneca and must have laid down no-nonsense disputation a la Albert Ellis.

Many of my patients whose chief trouble is emotional come to me saying, “My feelings form a group apart, and my reason exists beside them; between these two compartments there are air- tight partitions which do not allow my reason to introduce order into my feelings.” I answer them, “You deceive yourselves; there are no primary feelings; they are all bound to a mental representation of intellectual order, accessible to the criticism of reason. So also is there a logic of feelings. They should only penetrate our soul and remain there when they have received the permission of our reason. Your tendency to separate these two fields equals the saying, so commonplace and so foolish, ‘It is stronger than I.’ This is not the spirit that leads to victory.

Though I am uncoachable, I like it when coaches talk about victory. I somehow suspect that therapists don’t talk about victory nowadays though cognitive behavioral therapists are into Dr. Dubois’ cognitive model of emotion (our emotions are cognitive in nature so clarify values and dispute distorted beliefs).

Therapists nowadays, like Dr. Dubois but with a lighter touch, try to educate clients to a less inaccurate view of emotions. Many people see their reason and emotions in separate bins. Or they might think emotions are forced on them from world, “Traffic makes me crazy” and “I wouldn’t hit you if you didn’t make me so mad.” Generally speaking, people need to be less naïve about their ability to control their emotions and smarten up about reason and emotions being interconnected.

At least, I do! 

Who knows why some scholarly items die and others do not? Though Dr. Dubois’ books were translated into incredibly clear English, he was not widely read in the UK or the USA. Donald Robertson, CBT therapist, points out that Dr. Dubois did not write a book about perversions nor did he lecture at American universities on sensational topics like penis envy and castration anxiety like you-know-who. Dubois urged us to think more seriously about common sense topics like courage, patience, and tolerance and was forgotten in the West. Ironically he stayed in good repute in the USSR, where Freudianism was regarded as pseudo-scientific rubbish, one of the few things the commissars got right.

Anyway, even for a moralistically vain palooka like me, sometimes Dubois’ moral exhortations feel earnest and over the top. But I’m glad I read this. I believe that my tranquil resilient old age will be closely connected to my taking responsibility for attitudes I adopt in response to the emotional shoals and challenges of aging. Does this response help me or hurt me? Does this response square with the facts? Does this response seem logical and reasonable?