Newman Lecture - What are the Next Steps toward the Future of Catholic Christian Integration?

0:06Welcome. Welcome to the Saint John Henry Newman Lecture by Paul Vitz. Hello. My name is Craig Stephen Titus. I'm a professor at Divine Mercy University and director of the Saint John Henry Newman's Lecture Series. I have a great, I have the great pleasure also of moderating this evening's event. First, I would like to introduce Father Walter Hsu, one of the professors and chaplains at DMU. He will open our event with a prayer. Father Hsu. Thank you, Doctor. Titus. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord, we thank you for all those who are attending the Newman Lecture this evening. We invoke the Holy Spirit upon each one. May he enlighten and strengthen them.

0:54May he open their hearts to his inspirations through this evening's presentation by doctor Paul Vitz. May he move them to carry out any initiatives he may inspire in them through tonight's presentation. We also thank you, Lord, for the gift of Doctor. Paul Vitz, his wife, Timmy, and their whole family. We remember in a special way this evening their son, Father Daniel Vitz, who has preceded us to eternal life. May God have him in heaven so that he can intercede for the fruits of this evening's presentation. Finally, Lord, we thank you for the gift of Doctor. Vitz's life work, for the many people his books and teachings have helped, guided, and inspired through the course of the years, for the impact his work has had on the present direction of psychology and the future horizons that it opens.

1:50May you continue to bless Doctor. Vitz, Timmy, their family, and all of us here participating in this conference for years to come. Amen. Thank you, Father Hsu for those profound words. First, a few a few words about the question and answer period, some housekeeping. If you have any questions, please feel free to write them in the chat box or the question and answer box in Zoom. There will be a short break after the lecture while Doctor. Vitz prepares his responses to your questions. For technical reasons though, questions will be accepted only until just before the end of the talk. Next, I am happy to introduce the Newman Lecture Series itself. The series is held under the sponsorship of Divine Mercy University.

2:44The series is in its twenty third year having survived the challenges, many challenges, but including the challenge of COVID. As is our tradition, this series aims at building a body of learned discussion that is Catholic both in its breadth and its breadth of research and in its dialogue with contemporary Catholic Christian thought. In particular the twenty twenty two-twenty twenty three Newman Lecture Series celebrates the integration of a Catholic Christian vision of the person with the mental health services through the life work of DMU's most influential scholar, Paul C. Vitz. Paul Bitz has made the impact has made an impact on contemporary psychology over for over, forty years starting before the publication of his groundbreaking work, Psychology as Religion the Cult of Self Worship in 1977.

3:45The overall series will revisit and sometimes revise themes important to Doctor. Bitz's legacy. These themes include the direction of Catholic Christian integration today, Christian contributions to the integration of psychology, human consciousness embodiment and trans transhumanism, and, also the psychology of art and beauty. Doctor Ovitz's contributions to the field is are massive. To comment on his more than lengthy curriculum vitae would take all the time that we have at our disposal. Fortunately, the only thing better than hearing about Paul Vitz is to hear from Paul Vitz, so let us proceed. Doctor. Bitz. Okay. Hello, everybody. I'm still getting used to all of this new Zoom technology, but hello and blessings to you all.

4:43I'm speaking from DMU, which is in Northern Virginia. And I know that there are a lot of you out there on Zoom and many, many different places. My lecture tonight, I want it to be relatively informal. That is, I want it to become not just a series of lecture talks, but I want it to become something that stimulates you because the purpose of this lecture is to provide suggestions and ideas for research on on your part. That could be either a paper for, say, the midterm. It could be a dissertation topic. It could be an actual article that you submitted, or it could be perhaps a chapter that you might submit. I want you all to keep in mind then, as as we go through my discussion of the meta model, that I'm really trying to find ways to not just enlighten you about the model, but primarily to stimulate your understanding of the model in such a particular way that you can imagine making a contribution that's relevant to it in some way.

5:53One of the problems with the model is sometimes everybody thinks it's this big, huge, massive thing that's all fixed in stone or something like that. And it sort of seems overwhelming. You know? What do you do? The model is this almost like a well, you know, almost like a huge scary zombie or something like that. No. It has it's really quite friendly, and there are many, many different places where the model can be, added to by contributions from people just like you. So keep in mind then that my main goal is to hopefully give a topic or a particular subject that you would find interesting to write about. Something that would maybe support the model, something that might extend the model, something that might be new to the model, but the the model would have to deal with.

6:47There are a variety, large variety of different ways in which you can respond to some aspect of the model. So pay attention to and listen to where suddenly I come up with a topic that maybe interests you. And I will cover a lot of different ways of approaching the model, and some of them I hope will be relevant to each each of you. Alright. So we're gonna bend begin with what are the most general things that are relevant to the model, and which are now, by the way, what I'm talking about here primarily are people who are in psychology, counseling, and, related disciplines. But there are aspects of the model that will be quite relevant in my judgment to other forms of social science ranging from law or business or some other discipline, sociology.

7:49It's it's hard to keep them all in mind, but I'm sure that the notion of a person as we've conceptualized it here has relevance beyond just psychology and counseling. So if you're in one of those other disciplines, again, keep your ears open, something may pop up for you that will be really interesting. All right, we begin. The first things that are really needed to support the model and which are available for many of you are case histories. In other words, if you can write up a case history of an actual client that you had, where you mentioned the ways in which the factors found in the in the in the meta model are relevant, that's a good case history. I mean, you have you write it up as a good case history, but then you additionally emphasize the particular aspects of the meta model that you found relevant to your client.

8:52One exam one example of this, would be if you found that they were very interested in the spiritual life, or they were very interested in, perhaps the the virtues or something of that kind. But if any aspect of the meta model suddenly clicked for your client or clicked when you mentioned the topic to your client, that would be an important contribution in your case history. And then even more relevant than a case history would be if you write it up more thoroughly as a case conceptualization. A case conceptualization involves, you know, even your planning for how you're gonna do the future, the future interaction, the future program for development with your client. Case conceptualization would be another thing that you could develop in response, to the meta model.

9:48And we're planning here at DMU, we are planning to publish a book with case histories and case conceptualizations in it. So that's a potential place for for the publication of your work. Also, keep in mind that in psychology, there's now a new journal sponsored by the Catholic Psychotherapy Association, which will be directly relevant and which begins its publication for the first time in the spring, coming up in 2023. Now another thing that's quite relevant besides a case history or a case conceptualization is if you're interested in, well, let's say developing you could develop a model that would be really a representation of a questionnaire. Let me let me say, here's the problem. We have the meta model with certain emphasis in it.

10:46It would be nice to develop or to have available for each client and available for each therapist a short questionnaire, which allowed the the connection of the client to the meta model to be made clear. So that would be developing a questionnaire that would be part of identifying how the meta model relates to the particular client that you're seeing. So if you're interested in tests and measurements and things of that kind, such a short questionnaire would be very helpful. Okay, so the first three things are case history, case conceptualization, and possibly a questionnaire. Now, another major thing that the meta model has not developed adequately is the topic, is how ethics and morality relate to the, meta model in terms of how it would be addressed with a with a client.

11:51So we need many more contributions dealing with this ethical the ethical implications of the meta model for a psychotherapeutic situation. For example, you could write on how are conflicts between the values of the client and the therapist dealt with and treated in the meta model? One of the things that's very important about the meta model is we it is definitely not something to be used to to browbeat or push or in any way, try to control the client's belief system. Not no. The client is free and has to be understood as outside of being pushed around by the meta model. But in order for the fact that the meta model is neutral and the client or the therapist who uses it is not using it to try to convert or in any way change the the values directly in line with the meta model.

12:53We need case histories of that particular issue. You know, examples of here was the client, notice how they explained their values and enlisted them. They might be completely offensive to the typical, Catholic therapists, but how do you allow them to get fully expressed and honestly expressed, and then how you allow that expression to be treated with dignity and respect and not pushed around by you. So if you could show in the interaction, in the therapeutic session, how the neutrality of the meta model is is expressed so that the honest position of the of the client is really dealt with and in no way messed with on the part of the therapist. I think you know what I'm sort of talking about here.

13:40We wanna show that, not just state that it's the case, but it would be nice to have serious discussions of how that has been actually done, how it has been demonstrated. Another thing that you would would be important that's ethical that hasn't been developed very much is the meta model treats all human beings as having dignity and worthy of respect. And the ways in which the meta model develops that respect for the client, the way in which the meta model, helps grow the dignity or the understanding of the of their own dignity on the part of the client would be another topic that you could write about, make a great essay, give examples either from real therapy sessions or examples of hypothetical conditions in which it could be developed.

14:44Now I would say this, if you're serious about doing something in the way of writing about ethical and moral issues, The resident expert on this here at DMU is doctor Craig Titus. So it would be good to have, at least an initial interview with him so he can steer you in the right direction and, be a wonderful resource for you. Okay. So besides the general need for, as I said, case his case conceptualizations and so forth, the need for integration questionnaire about the model, the need for case histories, and above all the need for new interpretations and expressions of the ethical and ethical and moral characteristics and implications of the model. I now wanna turn to each of the premises of the model.

15:43So can we see the next slide? All right, this is a slide. Whoops, should have 11 at the top. Can we see it? I can't see number 11. I hope everybody can see there were 11 at the top. Get rid of that. There we are. Very good. All right. Let me explain first of all, this diagram is something I developed. I hope it will be useful. It hasn't been published elsewhere, so you're getting the first look at it. What the diagram, presents is each of the different premises of the meta model. And there are 11 premises in the meta model, and I've sort of implied how they might be understood as connected, but I don't wanna defend that in too much, too much detail or whether it is even correct. What I want the diagram to serve as is a way of each of us to understand a particular premise at a particular time, and then to look at that premise in in in light of our need to write an article, a paper, a dissertation, or what have you, that's relevant to the premise.

17:17So we're not looking at the model as a whole right now. We're gonna look at each premise and imagine what might be some of the topics you could write about that would support the premise, expand the premise, enlighten the premise. Okay. And we're gonna start at the bottom with premise one. And then we're gonna go two, three, etcetera, four through 11. Now premise one points out that the model understands the person is created by God. The person is basically good, and the good and and the and the person is male and female. And this is in contrast to the secular world where they never say anything about the origin of the human being normally. A few people might assume that the origin of the human being is from, evolution, and evolution is, of course, a random process.

18:21And it doesn't intrinsically mean that everything that comes out of revolution, which is random and survival based, is necessarily as dignity. And so if they wanna be evolutionists, we're gonna be criticizing them quite rightly for the absence of dignity and moral significance that they attribute to the person. They have none according to evolutionary theory. They'll have to add it on in some special way that isn't part of evolutionary theory. In addition, many other psychotherapists think of the person as just existing. Now most of the psychotherapists are pretty good people and they they do value their clients and do wish to help them. And that's very, very, very good about them. But they could be just valuing their client because, you know, they want to have a good reputation and they wanna get paid.

19:19It's not necessarily because the client is intrinsically of value. But in any case, we give an intrinsic basis based upon God and God's creation, why the person is basically good, why the person has dignity and value. And you could discuss that whole issue in a theoretical context of those topics that I just mentioned. By the way, one of the things that's important, this is extraordinarily important in certain respects today, we are created by God. We did not create ourselves. We discover who we are created to be or to become through our contact with God and through a humble awareness of our abilities. But in any case, we are not in the business of creating in any fundamental sense who we are, in spite of the fact that some secular positions today emphasize self creation.

20:25Alright. The next basic premise, and these are the three basic premises that constitute the theological premises of the model, is two, we are fallen via pride, envy, lust, hate, anxiety, depression, etcetera. Now even secular psychologists probably admit that we're fallen, not that they would use that language. But if we weren't naturally, capable of having bad psychological reactions, if we weren't naturally given to pathological reactions, well, they wouldn't have any business. They wouldn't have any clients. So they're happy enough to accept, yes, we do have a natural tendency to pathological conditions. And that as Christians and Catholics, we can say, this is what we call our fallen nature, but they would not use that language, fine.

21:23But they would accept that we have a natural tendency to things like envy, lust, hate, anxiety, depression. So we have a natural tendency to pathology that according to the Christian position was not necessarily part of us at the beginning, but it's part of our fallen nature. One of the things about accepting patients for the therapy, the, secular and particularly liberal therapists are always telling us how we are supposed to accept people who are, let's say, unusual or quite different in their understanding of sexuality and perhaps of a few other things. But whether the secularists would be equally open to clients and their values, for example, being tolerant of them, of clients who are not left wing but were right wing is very interesting.

22:28Would they accept fascists, sexist, racists, and so on? Or would they feel that these people had to have their values changed? And if so, on what basis? We are to we are not in the in the business of changing people's values by attempt by trying to argue them out of them or in some other way, seduce them into our position. We are there to help them in ways that we believe in the long run will allow them to come to a better and more valid value system, but coming to that is up to our client. One of the things is when with premise two about fallenness, and there may be essays that can be written about links between different aspects of, say, pathological psychology and the traditional understanding of devices.

23:34Alright. Now we go to three. And three box three is the redemption. And as Catholics and Christians, we are redeemed by Jesus Christ. That's where our redemption comes. But at the natural level, we would admit that there are other forms of redemption, but not all of the forms that are proposed by psychologists as a kind of redemption would we accept. But first of all, what are some of the reforms of redemption often not called that that are presented by secular psychology? Well, they often present things like self actualization. That's Carl Rogers, or self realization, and that's Carl Jung. Or perhaps they talk about something like, a fully rational understanding of ourselves via cognitive and behavioral therapy, and those theorists who would propose that.

24:35More recently, there are even some narrative psychologists, secular psychologists, who are arguing that the answer to a person is a new narrative, and they call. And that's what you should finish up the client with, the way in which a client is going to be concluded, if you will, that they'll finally leave your therapy when they have found this new story. And these therapists, these narrative therapists who help you find the new story, actually use many times the term a redemptive narrative. So first of all, keep in mind that redemption in a secular sense is often there in the secular models and needs to be more accurately described and highlighted. Now there's one new form of secular redemption that is very, relevant and certainly consistent with our Catholic position.

25:29It's not Christian. I mean, it's a secular, but, positive psychology now, the work of say people like Martin Seligman has come up with, flourishing as the form of redemption or the answer to these, you know, to the your pathologies is the conclusion of your therapy. And what they mean by flourishing, these positive psychologists, what they mean by flourishing is actually growth in the virtues. And, of course, this is still secular, the growth in these virtues, but we would accept that as a very good secular notion of of of redemption that is actually proto Christian in many ways. Taken together, these three premises, one, two, and three, created, fallen, redeemed, constitute a very general narrative for the life of every person who's a Christian.

26:29And in many ways at the secular level, they also are, if you will, a narrative for secular psychotherapy. The person comes in, they have pathologies as shown in number two, and they get in some way redeemed in or come to flourish or in some way overcome their pathology of stage two. And stage one is just sort of normally assumed that people are relatively good. At least every therapist tends to assume that their clients are okay. So that's all for numbers one, two, and three. And what might you write about in terms of other premises? Well, premise four is that the human being is the person is a body soul unity, and that we should be understood holistically. Well, here, anybody who wants to write about holistic psychology and the secular psychologists who have emphasized that and how it connects with the meta model.

27:36That's a wonderful and rich topic. The holistic psychologists did include most of the existential therapists. And, I think even, Carl Rogers for all of his other difficulties that we would have with him, he was holistic, and three cheers for that. So you could talk about the different holistic psychologies, the way in which the people argued for them, and how and then what and and the ways in which these actually support the holistic assumption of the meta model. You could also talk about the body soul unity or integration. And, of course, today, the soul has fallen out of use in most of psychology, but there's some signs that it's coming back. And here I'd like to, put in a little plug for a paper that, Craig Titus and I just published about the reintroduction of the soul in psychology, and, it came out this summer.

28:31And you might wanna use that if you wanted to look at the soul and how it could be more adequately conceptualized, more adequately integrated, more adequately developed, and more adequately enlarged in its relevance to to the meta model and to the person, you might wanna find that paper as a good starting point. But anyway, body soul unity is a topic and holism. They're both topics coming out of the premise number four. Premise number five is emotion. And here, there's a lot of evidence that psychology accepts emotion as a basic characteristic of the human person. So there's no problem of conflict with psychology. But you might wanna discuss in some detail how emotion focused therapy or other types of therapy of that kind do relate to the concept of emotion in the meta model.

29:33In addition, you might wish to discuss how some of our emotions seem to be instinctive or innate, but some of our emotions are also willed. We will some of our emotions. Some of us, shall we say, revel in self pity. Most self pity has been created by our own willful choice of it. There are other emotions that even though we didn't create them or start them, we continue to fuel them or continue to have them because we don't willfully decide to leave them behind or to change them. Our next notion here, our next premise is the sensory perceptual cognitive premise. Here again, secular psychology has a lot of material for us. We're not in disagreement with them. You might wanna describe how this is related to the meta model.

30:31Again, some sensory, perceptual, and cognitive material is innate, and some of it is learned and developed. But how this is related to the rest of the person's understanding of himself or herself, in terms of the other principles of the model, the other premises such as rational and interpersonal and will, those would be things to explore. You can take sensory perceptual cognitive psychologists and argue how that's related or serves as a foundation perhaps to either interpersonal things or rational things. Premise seven is interpersonal is a major source of the person. Again, there are a good number of recent psychologists who have made the interpersonal aspects of our life very important, such as Bowlby and his attachment theory, but there are many others.

31:26And so just to bring those into context and relationship to the meta model, those existing theories would be a nice little paper. If you did a bunch of them, it'd be a nice big paper. But as Catholic Christians, we're foundationally interpersonal. We were made by God who was personal, and we were made for love of God to love God, and we were made to love others. So our primary notion of what we are and how we are to become who we are to become is through the interpersonal is through our interpersonal relationships, in particular through love. The next premise is that we are rational and that we have language and a form of consciousness that seems to be unique to humans as distinct from other animals.

32:17In other words, here you can talk about our reason, our language, our human consciousness, any of those, and how it's related to our distinctiveness as humans. What is it? Why is it distinctive? Why have we transcended with our human consciousness, transcended the animals, and what is the evidence of this? There are a good number of other secular psychologists who claim this as well. I was surprised to see the other day that Noam Chomsky is one of them. Don't have much else in common with Noam Chomsky, but boy, this was a nice essay with his understanding because of the nature of language that human beings were unique in their consciousness. So that's a nice topic for discussion. Related to our rational and language capacities is will.

33:04And the whole emphasis on human will with some freedom is important. There's some people today trying to say we have no free will. Those issues have to be addressed, and the methodologies behind the evidence have to be critiqued. We also have to address will in terms of how it's related to things like addictions, particularly. How will can be increased? Are there ways in which, for example, training and virtues might help increase our ability to control through our will, addictions and other things and, you know, other obsessions that we might have. Okay. Now we go to, after Will. Oh, by the way, one of the things that would fit under will is because the and this is related to almost it's a both a virtue and a form of almost emotion, the notion of hope, which people in therapy usually choose already before they go into therapy.

34:24That is they're hopeful, which is why they're willing to see you. And so the whole relevance of will and hope is an important topic that needs to be developed. Okay. We go from box nine, we go to box 10. And box 10 is really a big one in the meta model that is vocation. And we have in the meta model three, major, three basic vocations. We have a vocation to personal development, and that could be either seen as to be redeemed in the Catholic and Christian sense or maybe just as in the sense of secular flourishing. But we need to understand how this vocation for of a kind is relevant to each each client in therapy. We need to also understand how our state of life, married or single or consecrated, how that state in life is related to, the problems the person might have in therapy.

35:23And we also need to know how are the person's job or social relationship is related to, not only their therapeutic situation, but to perhaps how they're going to eventually find fulfillment. Some people have even suggested that there's a fourth vocation, and that's the vocation to leisure. What do we do with our leisure? Prop up our feet with a quart of beer and watch television all night? You know, that could be a problem for a client that you would have to address even though normally it wouldn't come up. But you might have been worried about their leisure as something that was a vocation that they were not adequately dealing with. Anyway, somebody might wanna make the claim that leisure is a fourth vocation, and that's that would be a challenge to add to the model.

36:14In any case, our our social contributions, our job, is important, and we have to look at that as relevant to the pathology or non pathology of our clients. In addition, something like the social concern of a patient is related to other things in the secular world. One of the most famous examples is that, Adler, proposed social interest as one of the necessary characteristics of mental health. So it would be nice to look at how Adler and the meta model are in agreement and how in which they mutually support each other as another topic. And finally, we move now to the eleventh premise of the meta model, which are the virtues and character strengths. This is a very important thing that the model has emphasized.

37:05It is true now that psychology under positive psychologists is beginning to address natural virtues. But all of these are now relevant for us psychologists to deal with in terms of how they connect to the meta model. One of the most important things to look at is would intervention with a client in a particular virtue, help deal with one of their pathologies? Is there a virtue that you could enter, you could introduce to deal with depression? Is there a virtue you could introduce to deal with narcissism? Are there ways in which we should look at the client as having virtues that are positive and that therefore, if we measured them and got a good glimpse of them, we could bring them into the therapy and try to increase the strength of those virtues that they already had.

37:58And that this might be one of the best ways in which we can help them overcome their pathologies. So overcoming, pathologies with the introduction of a virtual training, the development of their existing virtues, so that their strength is increased. All of these are ways in which psychotherapy can be enhanced via the emphasis of premise number 11 in the meta model. Okay. So I wanna go on now to slide two, if we can. Now we're looking at a different aspect of the meta model. Wasn't no noticed, especially in those in that diagram or in my previous comments. One of the things about the meta model is that it understands the person as existing at many different levels. That these levels are all integrated.

38:58In other words, we are an integrated laminate of different concepts. Let's go back to the first one there. Alright. Yeah. There we are. This is actually slide two, the first part of slide two. And you notice what it means is that we can think of the person as understandable from a theological level. We can think of the person from a philosophical level. We can think of the person from a social or cultural level. We can think of the person in terms of psychological theory. We can then go into this interior of the person And the inter can you hear me? Okay. You can go into the interior of the person, and you can think of the person as having three interior kinds of experience. Each of these interior experiences we'll we'll call qualia one, qualia two, and qualia three.

39:56Qualia three would be the highest level of those interior kinds of experience, And they would be the mist it would be the mystical experience or or or implications of the mystical, which we often get when we have the response of awe in response to truth and beauty and goodness. There are times when we feel where we can't really say or describe what we felt because it was too transcendent, may come from even a near death experience or something of that kind or from a mystical experience. But we do have at least interior in the interior life, an experience of what I call, quality of three that is a kind of interior qualitative experience that's very hard to describe, but it is distinct. The next most interior the next highest most interior experience is the one that you're probably experiencing right now.

40:58That's normal conscious mental light. You're thinking about, well, when is it gonna get through so I can get to my dinner because I'm getting hungry or you're maybe wondering who in your neighborhood is making the noise outside, or maybe you're thinking about these concepts as they are as I describe them and how they might relate to something you might do. But that's your personal normal psychological experience. It is it's related to language and self consciousness, and it is transcendent in the sense that it's higher than that of the experience of animals, and it's quite related to our, use of language. And finally, we have at the most basic level, basic awareness. And this is probably animal like.

41:46I won't go into it, but we have just an awareness of the outside world without understanding its meaning. It's a kind of awareness that perhaps a newborn infant has before they've developed language and human consciousness. They're sort of aware of their mother. They may respond to her, but they may not understand her in any way like they will eventually. They're still somewhat animal like in their basic awareness. Okay. Now we can go to slide two and a half. There we are. So there are I've listed, what is it, seven levels above, three which are your mental internal states, four of which were intellectual understandings above, your your conscious mind, and three are rational and observable states that exist below your conscious mind and below even awareness, and I call them level minus one, minus two, and minus three.

42:46And level minus one is observable behavior, the objective understanding of behavior as you look at it, like looking at different attachment styles. Level two is the first is neuroscience. Here's where you start looking inside the person at where the behavior seems to be located in the brain. You start looking maybe at early gross, circuitry. And finally, you can go into the brain at a level and level minus three, which is not just at the circuitry or the low not just the location or the circuitry, but it's all we're all always down to the more even more restricted. You're talking about biochemical hormones and neurotransmitters. These are also affecting the psychology of the person. So we have and when you're looking when you're dealing with the person, your question, you have to think of them at various times of in terms of them at their biochemical level, their neuroscience level, their behavioral level, then at those mental levels of experience that we have.

43:50And then finally, at the highest levels of psychological theory, culture and social theory, philosophy, and at the highest highest level, theology. And so this is a way of as a integrated laminate to understand the person. So the person is more than just the psychological level that you're looking at in psychotherapy. You have to be aware of the behavioral and above all the biochemical and brain levels that are present, and you have to be aware of the theological and philosophical and other levels as well. For example, the diversity of culture. Of these levels, any of them are open for you to do write a paper or do a dissertation. But the one level that has been most neglected by those of us working on the meta model is level I think it was level what is it?

44:43Level five, which was the social and cultural level. And that's where the whole notion of diversity comes in. Go back to slide two, that whole level, theory, theories of the mental process. I mean, social cultural, social, you know, that's level five. We don't we have very little that we have on that in the meta model. For example, what would be the difference in the understanding of the person that because you were Spanish in background, or maybe you're African American in background, or maybe you have a different understanding of what the person is because of the diversity of who you are, the diverse group from which you come. That's part of what needs to be developed, and we haven't done enough on it.

45:32We're quite aware of it. We certainly aren't ignoring it. We do have some on it, but it needs to be expanded. So that might be a good topic for some of you out there. Okay. Now let's go on to, the next slide and our last slide. Now let's say we take something. Remember I said in a very general sense, you should always think of your person as the the the person, your client as existing at different levels, and that these are integrated. They relate to each other. It's not as though they're on, it's not as though they're unrelated to each other, they somehow rather reinforce, they, they reinforce each other. They reinforce the levels particularly above immediately above and immediately below them.

46:26In other words, they integrate. And you should be aware of the level immediately above and immediately below, particularly when you're dealing with a client at one of these other levels. Let me take a particular aspect of psychology and, look at it at each of these different levels where we see that we're looking at the same thing at each of the different levels. I mean, you could look at love at each of these levels, or you could look at hatred each of these levels, and you could look at fear at each of these levels. Instead, I'm going to look at interpersonal relations. What how does each level understand the person as an interpersonal phenomenon? And of course, at level seven, which is theology, where the person is created, the created person is created in the relate in a relationship.

47:25The person has a relationship to God and others when you relate when you're born. So we are related to God. Some people may deny this, but we know we are related to God, and we certainly know we're related to others. You began relating to your mother in the womb. And as soon as you're born, you relate to your mother and other members of your family. And so we can look here at the whole notion of theology as self giving love. We can look at other theorists such as Torrance, Ratzinger, and Nisiolis, and Buber, and others will all talk about the person as intrinsically interpersonal. And they're talking about it at a theological level, those particular theorists. And you can talk about how that's related to our understanding of the person or how they're mutually reinforcing the different theorists that I mentioned.

48:18Now let's look at what is a person, in terms of integration of interpersonal. We could look at the person as interpersonal. At the philosophical level, most of us would look at I guess, philosophy talks about us as interpersonal. Perhaps the most obvious way is when you talk about you you should do unto others as you you would have them do unto you. There are a lot of interpersonal interpretations of the of the person at the philosophical level. You can talk about them as they're related to each other and to the model and as they might relate to a client. At the level of, social cultural, we have the person in terms of cultural roles. You know, the interpersonally, the culture were often supplies different roles for the individual.

49:25They They have different cultural roles and emphases in Spanish and African American and African culture and, Asian culture and so on. These different roles need to be emphasized and understood as part of the sociological and cultural level, including sex roles, which are often vary from culture to culture as well, at least very somewhat. We can also go to the theories of we can also go to reason is focused on human psychology. We can talk about, equity and complementarity of male and female roles. We can talk about reason as it exists in in the theories of object relations. We can look at reason as it exists in the theories of relationships, attachment theory, interpersonal psychodynamics.

50:19All of these are psychological theories of the interpersonal life. Object relations is not is it interpersonal theory. Attachment is interpersonal theory. There's interpersonal psychodynamics. There's theories of relationships. All of these are at this level four, and you can talk about them in terms of their relationship to each other. You can talk about one or more of them in terms of their relationship to the meta model itself or to have one or more of them through the meta model's emphasis relates in there to client in therapy. Then we come to levels the the psychological experience, levels three, two, and one. Well, besides, of course, specific male or field male experiences, you can also have an experience of relationships.

51:08How are they experienced? How do we experience love and friendship? How do we experience the different kinds of relationships which we have for others? Friendship in particular is relationship. How do we experience that? What is the what is it like, if you will, as a mental phenomenon? And maybe you need to address also when you talk about that level of experience of friendship, you may need to talk about the person at other levels as well. Finally, go to level level one, minus one, that is, here's objective real objective reality. How are different interpersonal relationships, such as attachment styles, how do they differ in behavior? What are those attachment styles? We know there are roughly four of them, and then they're they're observable in behavior, but how are these related even to sex differences in attachment styles?

52:03Are there, or when would they be? But just how does attachment show up in different styles, and how is this part of the interpersonal level of behavior, in the model? And then we can go to brain and the brain level. We can talk about brain structures and attachment levels. Some of these may be differentially related to the males and females. But for example, we could look at what's happened to the pathology of the right hemisphere in the, let's say, in the probably in the year two through four in people who have, serious attachment, difficulties. Apparently, there are brain pattern differences there that are related to attachment, pathologies. And so we would look at them as related to whether it was an avoidance or perhaps ambivalence in attachment style or perhaps even totally confused attachment style.

53:06And finally, when you get all the way down to biochemistry, which is on the bottom of minus three is the biochemistry level. And I'll tell you what minus three is. Minus three is, biology, biochemistry. And what do you mean by interpersonal relationships at biochemical level? Well, one of the ways in which that's relevant, One of the ways in which that's relevant is in terms of oxytocin. Oxytocin is a biochemical that creates bonding. And you should be aware of that and understand that because some people are, some psychiatrists are occasionally recommending oxytocin as a as an aid to people whose attachment and bonding relationships are inadequate and weak. And so that it might overcome, for example, some of the autistic, interpersonal, difficulties that some people have.

54:12So we should be aware of that. One of the reasons I mentioned all of this potential biological stuff is here, and I wanna make a hypothesis, is that sometime in the future of the young psychotherapists that are listening to me now, people may come up with, a kind of mask or cap that you could put on a person that would identify what part of the brain was being stimulated. And you might discover that although there were three or four places where depression could be stimulated, they were in different parts of the brain. And depending upon what part of the brain they were in, it was a different source of the depression, a different kind of depression. But I say so that you might, in fact, recognize a better diagnostic understanding of a person's pathology by knowing not only that they were depressed and when it happened and how it might have happened, but what part of the brain it was located in.

55:14So that would be understanding depression, a psychological phenomenon, what part of the brain it was located in, and perhaps how it affected either interpersonal relationships or not. So I'm wanting you to understand that you may be integrating different levels of knowledge about the person because this enriches your understanding of the person, and you're not just gonna sit at one level like cognitive and behavioral and not deal with anything else. That may be adequate in a few very limited cases, but normally you need to have an integrated set of understandings of the person, even though you will focus primarily on one or maybe on one or two of these levels. In addition, what I wanna emphasize here is that this integrative understanding of the person is an enlargement of the person.

56:08Then there is a tendency for psychologists sometimes when they've only when you're only good at one particular form of psychotherapeutic interaction, one particular theory of intervention to reduce the person to just the level at which that intervention is is likely to take place. But often that level is going to be contextualized in terms of how it really can be addressed by the level above it or the level below it or the level couple top, a couple above it. It may have to be contextualized by the social and cultural diversity in the person. It may have to be addressed by talking to a psychiatrist or even maybe when psychologists can do it, talking to a psychiatrist about, medications that might even deal with the biochemical level.

57:01Certainly, the that's how many psychiatrists are dealing with us. When they come in, you come in, they give you a pill. So that's how Paxil is gonna take care of your depression or of your anxiety or whatever. So but what I'm trying to say, at least in the most general sense, you should understand your person is integrated across all of these levels. That's what a person is. And even though you will focus with your particular talents at one level or with certain kinds of interventions. Nevertheless, these other levels need to be kept in mind because you may wish to occasionally address them because the problem that the client has may be really more fully expressed at, at a level other than the one you are most comfortable with and are addressing.

57:51So we are an integrated or laminate. Did you understand that term? An integrated laminate. Each of these laminates or levels of the person relates to the other person relates to the same concept at a different level. For example, a ski, when you're going skiing, is a laminate. It'll have one level for strength, one level of metal for flexibility, another level for lack of, you know, for for for being very low in friction, so it slides over snow quickly, and another level so you can perhaps at the very top of the ski, put the put down the name of the maker of the ski, the manufacturer and so forth. Or so that you have in a ski and laminate where each of the different levels contribute something to the function of the ski.

58:44And so in that sense, it's an integrated laminate for the for the purpose of a human who's going to be skiing. And you want to have an integrated laminate understanding of the person for how you understand that person in psychotherapy. The laminate may be slightly different, of course, for different people. Alright. I think we're about ready to here it is. I think it's about 06:30. I think I've been talking more than enough, and I hope you follow some of these that each of you have some maybe some questions or some idea about what topic they might write a paper about or write a a dissertation on or write a publishable paper or even write one of our chapters in the upcoming book on the case histories, conceptual, understandings of the person and so forth that we're trying to put together as our next volume.

59:44So now, I'm open to questions, and I gather the team that's here working with me is busy taking them off your chat box or wherever you put them, typing them up, and you're gonna give them to me and I'll try to answer them. Okay. Hello, everybody. We're into the question and answer period. I got a bunch of them that were just that you sent into the chat room or someplace, and then it got typed up and given to me by a wonderful team that I'm working with. Okay. I'll I'll I'll read them and I hope we will have enough time to cover all of them. I'm not sure. They're more than, I expected. Great lecture. A point of clarification. Might one conceptualize the virtues and the development of virtues as practical means toward the self giving and fulfillment that occurs in the context of one's relationships and vocations?

1:00:45Or how might we think of the relationship between these two meta model premises, virtues and vocations? This is a very good question. And I think, Doctor. Titus has already clearly answered it. I did not in my talk or in my remarks. The Meta Model assumes that the virtues are the procedure, are the fulfillment, are necessary characteristics for the development of our vocations. In other words, our vocation will develop as the strength and the growth of our, virtues develop. So that would be the connection. Virtues are the grounding, the groundwork, the basis of our vocational development. You also mentioned in there the concept of self giving. This is one of the important things that the meta model does allow and emphasizes because of its Christian context.

1:01:44It's important to remember that self giving and the idea of giving yourself to the other is a form of fulfillment is the opposite of most secular understandings of what fulfillment is. For most self for most people in the secular world, fulfillment is the getting of things for the self, not the giving of the self away. So this is a very major, contrast. In a certain sense, the secular world is as it is exists now without any emphasis on the other in terms of self giving is almost intrinsically narcissistic. Okay. Next question. You mentioned the phenomenon of hope as something present in the will as well as an emotion. Someone has said that the Greeks perhaps proposed too strong a divide between the rational and the emotional dimensions of the person.

1:02:39Others, von Hildebrand, champion the unity of both physical and spiritual affections in the human heart. Can you speak to this idea of both physical and spiritual emotions and personal unity? Is this the emphasis of four? Well, look, I would say that I tried to put the emotions in there next to cognitive behavioral cognitive and excuse me, cognitive and perceptual and sensory things. Our cognitive and sensory things are as we experience them are intrinsically emotional, and it's almost impossible to have a sensation, a perception, or a cognition without an emotion with it. So the emotion and that level at any rate of the model are intrinsically connected and go together. And so this is part of, of course, personal unity.

1:03:35Three, as you describe the three levels of described mental experience, where do emotions belong in reference to slide two? The emotions can both occur at the level of awareness, the lowest level. They can occur at each level. The emotions will probably be distinct to each level. At a level of awareness, we have emotions rather like animals have them, where they're unaware of the meaning of many of the emotions they're having. They're not aware of death, for example, when they're frightened. We, in addition to have being frightened, are aware of death, so we have that emotion there. But when we also have emotions at level three, when we have the spiritual or transcendent mystical emotions, there are emotions, emotions of peace, emotions of joy that are present, but the content of these states is often in terms of thought or words or cognitions hard to describe.

1:04:31But the emotions are unique, I think, to each of the three levels. Professor Vince, you mentioned in your writings the power of narrative psych in facilitating change and hope. I have found it particularly effective in my work with children. Do you still consider it to be one of the most effective therapies, and can you comment on where it may not be effective? Well, I'm no expert on on narrative therapy. The fact that it's very good with children is I think already a sign of one group that it's effective with or especially so. Other than that, I'll have to pass as a not very experienced or competent narrative therapist. But it is true that they're beginning to talk about, and this is mostly I think for adults, redemptive stories, stories that redeem, in fact, the previous time of pathology.

1:05:25It's as though the pathology in a certain sense, therefore, has prepared them for the positive notion of redemption that they're actually now involved in. But that would be for adults mostly, I would think. In respect to the part of the meta model in the sentence and another question in the second slide that looks at the difference between human and animals, is there a specific difference that you would think to be important to explore? For example, you said that, by the way, we humans use language, and it becomes evident that humans are different from animals. Is there another another difference that seems to be more important than others for the meta model? How might a theologically expanded meta model be useful for clinicians who are restricted because of work from explicit mention of faith or spirituality?

1:06:16Those are two questions. Human beings seem to transcend the awareness that's present in the life of animals. I have a paper out on the origin of human consciousness, which I didn't go into the material here, which proposes that it was the transcending analog and digital symbols led to a new form of experience in which you were the namer. You were above both analog and above both digital experience or above both analog and digital mental representations in the nervous system. And this led you to the to true human consciousness, which you were aware of time, of good and bad, and all sorts of other things. This awareness is identified very beautifully in the life story of Helen Keller, when suddenly she became human in the sense of human as self conscious.

1:07:16She was human before that, like an infant is human before that, but she became aware of human consciousness at a particular time when she had her hand under the under the water pump. And it's very interesting. You can explore this. The hand that she had was her right hand, which was on no. No. It was her left hand that was under the water pump, and her right hand was the one that her teacher was communicating with tactile codes. So I think it was as though the analog and the digital were both understood and transcended, which gave rise to language and the naming insight. That's about all I can say, except you might look into that paper. The meta model can be used for, people where where in the context, you can't talk about the spiritual, but you can't talk about even the secular client will have a goal of fulfillment of some kind.

1:08:11It isn't obviously redemption in the Christian sense, but you can say, what would we be fulfilling for you? And certainly, Seligman and the positive psychologists talk about, fulfillment and, flourishing and things of that notion. And certainly that doesn't bug the secularists. And it's the it's the proto it's the proto step to spiritual fulfillment. Is there any connection or possible synthesis of the meta model and Viktor Frankl's love of therapy? I wouldn't be a bit surprised that there are important connections. You wanna write an important paper? There it is. Of course, it might turn into a book, but I'm sure you can pick out one part that was suitable for a paper or two. There's a question about certain kinds of, you know, psychotherapy, such as interpersonal neurobiology or internal family systems that understand a person's struggles, not as pathologies, but as developmental adaptations that serve survival and attachment needs.

1:09:34How does this relate to your use in the meta model language and pathology? Well, I would say these problems are pathologies until you do overcome them. Once you overcome them, you can now see them retrospectively as survival, as developmental adaptations. But they're not a developmental adaptation until you overcome them. But that would be adequately understood in the meta model as a developmental adaptation would also build character strengths and virtues. The question, is there a need for an integration of the existential idea that we can create meaning in the first premise, or is that excluded? The fact that we can create meaning is not excluded. Obviously, we can create meaning. What I said was we can create the the ultimate meaning of who we are.

1:10:32We do not create ourselves, but we can create certain concepts of meaning that we come by overcoming our pathologies and developing virtues and finding a form of flourishing. And that so that kind of meaning, yes, we can create, and it is a challenge. So I'm not saying all meaning. It's the meaning that says we can create who we are in some foundational sense. And even that kind of meaning that we can create is really more a kind of meaning that we discover. It's not so much we created it as we discover it. We discover the meaning in overcoming our pathologies. We discover the meaning in things that we thought were just pain, but now we can learn to walk from that pain. So we discover it more than that we created.

1:11:29You know, I mentioned that the sociological cultural level is in much need of additional information. What direction would you recommend a researcher to start? Well, whatever direction seems relevant to you, but I, you know, you could start by just saying, I would like to see how the Spanish world or the African world or the Middle Eastern world would, put in their own diverse understanding of some of these concepts ranging from theology to philosophy, to the understanding of, even psychological notions like attachment. Would you note any element of industrial organizational psychology that relates to the premise of vocation? Well, in fact, in the IO psychology has is in fact the only part of psychology that does deal with, let's say, your aptitude for for jobs or aptitude for different, you know, occupations.

1:12:33The problem is none of that has ever been normally not gotten into psychotherapy or counseling. It's south it's out there under IO. So it's time to get it into regular psychology. And again, we have an idea that some of the aptitudes might not be what industrial and organizational psychology is focused on. They may be aptitudes for self giving or aptitudes for patience and the virtues of a kind that IO has ignored. But the IO does have positive virtues that they emphasize or talents that a person has, and those are quite relative, I mean, quite relative and relevant to the therapist, and the therapist has to bring them in because in the past, they haven't been given much emphasis in psychotherapy and counseling.

1:13:24What about the demonic? How would you anticipate a clinician using that information, especially when a client did not want spiritually incorporated in their therapy? Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that many mental difficulties and mental pathologies of a moderate level have as part of the they're comorbid often with demonic or moderately satanic influences, not total of, you know, it's not as though the person is totally controlled. It's not as though they're possessed or anything like that. It's they have an oppression, a demonic oppression. And the therapist can uncover that by asking, about, you know, what has your asking the client, have you been involved in Ouija boards? Have you been involved in covens?

1:14:17There are lots of witches covens out there today, which are growing. Have you been involved in some kind of, you know, if you will, implicitly, otherworldly, but negative and dangerous, contact? And that therefore for the with the therapist is something to note. Now the therapist is not trained to normally deal with that. So you might suggest if they're a Christian, they might wanna talk to a spiritual advisor. Or, maybe if they're Jewish too, maybe to talk to a spiritual adviser. But if they recognize that this might be there and they're not at all religious, you just pointed out that it might be there, and it's up to them to find a way to deal with it when and if they wish to. To. But it's not your job normally to try to remove spiritual difficulties from the person's life.

1:15:18Well, it's this is about spiritual direction and the possibility of transcending mental pathologies through, I think, spiritual transformation. First of all, I think this is possible in certain conditions, but this is up to spiritual directors, not up to psychologists. If there were a spiritual guidance that could take a particular psychological pathology and often transcend it, that would be a major contribution to even bring out into the literature. At present, positive connections between the spiritual realm and mental pathologies are really very vague and, not well understood. And our psychologists have to deal they have enough to deal with if they're dealing with the mental pathology of the person.

1:16:12So the spiritual director or the spiritual advisor is the person who has to deal with these, say, if they're the demonic issues or things of that kind. And so you could form a team, work together on that. But of course, it requires that your patient is your client wants to do this. They're the ones who have the ultimate, say in whether that they want the spiritual addressed, not by you, but by somebody else with whom you might be in touch with. Here's a question. What would be a good point of contact for discussing developmental psychology as it relates to the meta model? I have a psychospiritual proposal for a parallel to Erikson's psychosocial stages and integration with other developmental theories.

1:17:05Well, look, Erikson was one of the few psychologists prior to the work of positive psychology who actually talked about what we would call virtues. They were usually the outcome of the successful outcome of a given psychosexual social stage of which he had, he had eight of them. He had three new ones on top of Freud. All of his virtues could be connected to the virtue, emphasis in the model of, in the meta model. So that would be one way of connecting it. And that would be also one way of potentially connecting it to developmental, theories. But let me put it this way. The developmental emphasis is really absent in the meta model. It's not there. What a wonderful thing to be able to contribute to to its expansion to to make that connection.

1:17:58How developmental psychology can link to the the to the aspects of the meta model. Wonderful. Joseph McClellan, maybe you can do that. 07:00 in a few seconds, so I'll sign off. Thank you all for being there. God bless you. And as I said, if you still have nagging questions, send them to me by email. Adios. Good. We'd like to thank you also, doctor Vitz, for your great performance this evening. You've given us much much to think about and, wisdom, ever be attentive. You brought it to us in a lively way. Thank you, doctor Vitz. Next, the next, Newman lecture will be on November 10. It'll be given, by Doctor. Robert Kugelman who is an expert, one of the foremost experts in the history of the integration of faith and psychology in The United States.

1:19:03He will talk, his talk will be addressing the works of Paul C. Bitz who will have more so the theme continues celebrating the contributions of Doctor. Bitz And, doctor Kugelman will do just that, focusing on the integration of religion and psychology in the works of Paul Vitz. So we all look forward to that. And, thank you again, doctor Vitz. And, farewell all. Thank you. Adios again.