Janov's Reflection on "More on the Difference Between Awareness and Consciousness"

More on the Difference Between Awareness and Consciousness

May I respectfully suggest that most of the current problems in psychotherapy today lie in the inability to differentiate between awareness and consciousness; thus, the cognitivists and insight therapist believe that if the patient is aware she will make progress. And I suggest that awareness has little to do with progress unless you are happy to get well from the neck up and leave the body behind.

So, let’s define things: awareness involves the last evolved neurologic system, the neocortex where ideas, beliefs and perceptions lie. Consciousness involves the three levels of consciousness, the three key brain systems working in harmony and fluidity. Consciousness involves all of us and particularly our history. Awareness is ahistoric and since we are historic beings we cannot hope to get well if we leave our past behind; if we ignore our history and what happened to us from our life in the womb onward.

When we rely on awareness we are dealing with a thin sliver of brain function, disconnected from physiologic processes which areprimal the motor for how and what we think. Thinking and beliefs (which is what we are asked to do in cognitive therapy, believe the therapy and therapist) are ultimately malleable and change with the wind; not so with lower brain processes which involved survival, and should not be so malleable. When we rely on awareness we are avoiding our life blood, our feelings; that is what makes us feeling human beings.

Why is feeling so important? When we speak of “quality of life,” we are dealing with feeling. So we have one brain, the left, that is fragmented and the other that sees the whole. To become whole we must manage to recruit the fragments of our lives into a complete picture; for that we need both brains hemispheres working in harmony. That is one definition of consciousness and its differentiation from awareness. In therapy we see how this works when after a feeling, the patient will begin a litany of, “That’s why I did this and why I did that.” The fragmented behavior begins to make total sense. It has a gestalt context—consciousness out of unconsciousness.

The Problem with Left Brain-Centered Psychotherapy:

Unfortunately, we tend to glorify left brain awareness to the neglect of the right feeling brain. We expect the left brain to fight our battles, particularly, the internal enemies. We do this without taking into account that left-brain development came into being much later in evolutionary history than the right brain, and in each of our individual lives, in part as a means of disengaging us from the other side. One kind of brain tissue cannot do the work of another. The left brain developed different abilities to avoid a redundancy between left and right. The left brain’s activity helps soothe and calm us. It allowed and continues to allow us to defend against feelings that were too much to bear. We use the left hemisphere to rationalize a hurt or insult so it won’t create so much pain. Or at the mercy of needs of which we may be only dimly aware, the left brain can superimpose all kinds of needs onto a romantic object and imagine her to be wonderful, only to be disappointed two years down the line because it didn’t see reality. It didn’t listen to the right because communication was either reduced or non-existent. When perception is detached from need and feeling, we misperceive. For instance, if we need a strong protector, we will overlook the other person’s weaknesses and ignore his flaws. We "see" protection where it may not exist, or we get protection accompanied by total domination.

It is difficult to know what is real about humans if we take words alone as a sign of reality.

The left frontal area is also where we conjure up or embrace beliefs(*). Insights given by a therapist are ultimately beliefs to soothe and ease pain. So of course the therapy patient feels better after a session. She has knocked down painful feelings; that is one of the key roles of the top level neocortex—suppress feelings. Indeed, the words of a therapist, no matter whether right or wrong, can be soothing to our agonies. It is not only the content of what the therapist says, but just his words offered in soothing tones. Oddly enough, that tone affects the right brain, not the left. The content of the insight remains in the left. We can be fooled into thinking that the content of an insight is what makes us feel better, but in reality it is the reassuring tone, all along. It dampens right side pain, the pain of a father who never cared, was never soft, and whose tone was unrelentingly harsh. The therapist’s presence says, “I’m here now. It’s going to be all right.” Just being in his office can make us feel better. In other words, the left side allows us to be partially oblivious to ourselves. This is particularly egregious when it comes to psychotherapy, which traditionally has been left brain focused for over 100 years.

It is now apparent, due to an abundance of new research, that psychotherapy must address the right brain and consider how to affect right-left brain connections—as this is the way feelings become integrated. Psychotherapy must work to help not only ourmental state but our entire neuro-physiologic system. This is the difference between dealing with words (left brain) and the use of images, scenes, and feelings (right brain). The former is what occurs when we “reflect” on our past, while genuine emotional retrieval, which is what is needed for integration and genuine healing, requires access to the right brain feeling structures. Once again we see that it is not possible to use ideas and thinking processes, which literally came along millions of years later in brain development to affect what is lower in the brain, and developed millions earlier.


(*) The right frontal area is as involved as the left, although the contributions to the ideas are different. The right will tend to “like” grander ideas.

Jan Johnsson's comments:

Consciousness and awareness

I  am confused re. the definition of consciousness and awareness. It is one of the important reasons that I started again to spend time with Rolfing (and Feldenkrais) to find out of the essential difference between c. and a. (the borders are certainly not clear in our use of the language) and to be able to charge certain processes to be aware and in control of the involuntare muscles, senses, emotions and creative abilities.

The following quotations from ”Awareness from Movements” (http://www.spiritual-minds.com/easternrelgions/Meditation/Awareness%20Through%20Movement-Health%20Exercise%20for%20Personal%20Growth%20-%20Moshe%20Feldenkrais.pdf), together with your Reflections bring my confusion to a more positive, improved, level:

All the more highly developed animals have an adequate amount of consciousness. They know the surroundings in which they live and their place within the family group, herd, or flock. Man is endowed with not only a more highly developed consciousness but with a specific capacity for abstraction. 

That enables him to distinguish and to know what is happening within him when he uses this power. Thus, he may know whether he does or does not understand something he knows. He is capable of a still higher form of abstraction that enables him to evaluate his state of abstraction and the extent to which he uses it. He can tell whether he is using his full power of awareness in order to know, and wether he realizes that he does not know something.

Awareness is consciousness together with the realization of what is happening within it or of what is going on within ourselves while we are conscious. Abstraction is the basis of verbalization. Abstract thought and verbalization capture the most prestigious place in science and social achievement. However, at the same time abstraction and verbalization become a dictator who deprives the individual of concrete reality; this in turn, causes severe disturbances in the harmony of most human activities. Frequently the degree of disturbance borders on mental and physical illness and causes premature senility. As verbal abstraction becomes more successful and more efficient, man’s thinking and imagination get further estranged from his feelings, senses, and even movements. 

In my bright moments when I am capable of grasping the definitions of and the relationship between consciousness, and awareness I got senses that I am coming a bit closer to a true interpretation of ”Mens sana in corpore sano”.

Jan Johnsson