Presentation given at the Society for Existential Analysis Annual Conference, London, 6 November 2021
Introduction
I have been living and practicing psychotherapy in Poland for the last twenty years. It is not the most human-respectful and kind place to live; however, both individually and as a society, we are doing our utmost to improve it. Thanks to my ability to communicate in English, I frequently work with patients coming from different cultures who have chosen to come to work and live here. I consider myself to be lucky to meet them and learn from them about the diversity of the world. I am grateful to them for widening my perspectives.
Today I am going to tell you, briefly, the story of four of them and the lessons they taught me: a Sicilian lady, who took me on a journey to occultism and back; one young African-American ex-military man, whose thoughts and feelings I comprehended while visiting the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes this year; Berat, a Turkish middle-aged man struggling with polyamory issues; and Kamila, a talented tennis player whose wallpaper has not changed since childhood.
Before I present them to you, let me briefly discuss the history and meaning of the main concepts and highlight the most important difference between them. Important to say, I would not come to certain conclusions and considerations without the help of the above-mentioned four.
Tolerance and respect
Two troubles with tolerance
The word ‘tolerance’ is extraordinarily popular today. Unfortunately, the fate that usually befalls words that are used frequently is that they are used carelessly, indiscriminately, and for all sorts of purposes, so that it in the end loses its true meaning.
Although the word itself was present in ancient Latin—it comes from tolerans (present participle of tolerare; to bear, endure, tolerate)—it became of much importance only later, as the solution to the social problem of divisions and religious strife in Europe in the sixteenth century. Tolerance was simply not persecuting others for religious beliefs and practices.Proponents of tolerance were concerned with reforming the law in that manner so that the state did not protect the main religion with the sword.Calls for toleration in this sense were numerous and multiplied, but, along with various edicts ensuring toleration in various countries, there were also revocations of those edicts, recurrences of persecution, and demands for punishment of heretics and dissenters. A tolerant regime is simply one that does not impose anything on the citizens of a state in religious matters.All this seems simple and uncontroversial today, but complications at that time arose very quickly. For the principle of tolerance to be accepted and to function, not only legal acts but also cultural conditions were needed, and these cannot be manufactured at the drop of a hat. For this reason, to make it all easier, a new sense has been brought to the idea of tolerance, namely, indifference. It made a fundamental difference. Please compare these two statements: “It is better to put up with even great errors than to provoke religious wars and deaths of thousands” and “Why not to tolerate the most diverse theological opinions, for all these are matters of indifference?”
Today the concept of tolerance has been extended to human attitudes, to our behavior, and to morality. In the original sense, I am tolerant if I do not persecute, do not demand persecution, or do not behave aggressively towards something that I clearly do not like, do not approve of, something that offends me or arouses dislike. In a somewhat similar sense, we use this word in medicine and technology: medicines are harmful, but we speak of tolerance of medicine if the organism tolerates it within certain limits; that is, endures it without serious harm. Interestingly to say, in France, brothels used to be called ‘houses of tolerance’; the name suggested that it was a bad device, but it was better for the society to tolerate its existence for a variety of reasons.
I have been noticing on a regular basis that tolerance—understood and felt as indifference, as a lack of any position or opinion, and sometimes even approval of everything we see in people and opinions—is popular nowadays. The demand for tolerance in this sense is a part of our hedonistic culture, in which nothing really matters to us; it is a philosophy of life without any responsibility and convictions. These tendencies are reinforced by various philosophical fashions that teach us that all is relative, so when I persist in my convictions, even if without any aggressiveness, I am already sinning against tolerance. This is harmful nonsense, absurd. Contempt for truth and the search for truth destroys our civilization no less than fanaticism.Our civilization too often propagates the feeling that everything should be treated as a play, as one wishes.
That was the first problem: the indifference twist, which makes the important meanings disappear.
The second reason why I do not like tolerance is because I believe there is a lot of hypocrisy in the very concept. As Fitzgerald wrote once, tolerance “carries echoes of at best grudging acceptance, and at worst ill-disguised hostility.” Hans Oberdiek, another philosophical researcher, saw it in a similar fashion: “We tolerate what we disapprove, what we wish were otherwise, what we think distasteful, disgusting, or morally deplorable.”
Because tolerators feel that they take high-risk stakes when tolerating someone they disapprove of, they often tend to regard themselves as morally superior not only towards the intolerant but also towards the very object of tolerance. By tolerating, they draw a line between the norm and the deviant that needs tolerance. After all, if the tolerated were not deviant from a normative order, they would not need to be tolerated in the first place, as Brown points out:
Tolerance is generally conferred by those who do not require it on those who do; it arises within and codifies a normative order in which those who deviate from rather than conform to the norms are eligible for tolerance. […] When the heterosexual tolerates the homosexual, when Christians tolerate Muslims in the West, not only do the first terms not require tolerance but their standing as that which confers tolerance establishes their superiority over that which is said to require tolerance…To be barely tolerated can be emotionally uncomfortable.I believe that people have the right to expect more than mere tolerance.Although tolerance might be a required minimum of social interaction sometimes, stagnancy on that level involves a life without dignity, as a young Palestinian woman living in Sweden expresses:
If I’m in town and go into a store, then I’m a svartskalle (literally ‘black head’, a derogatory slang term in Swedish encompassing all non-Swedes or immigrants/minorities of colour). I can’t help it. I’m just a svartskalle. They stare at you till you leave. They
think you’ve stolen clothes or something […] Here you live without any dignity. Having food and not freezing to death aren’t enough. You want to live like a human being. You want to live with a sense of dignity.That sounds like a call for respect rather than tolerance. So what is respect, then?
Etymology of respect
As its Latin root, respicere (to look back at, to look again), indicates, to respect something is to pay particular attention to it, to give it careful consideration, to take it seriously, and to try to perceive it clearly. Thus, to ignore, disregard, or be oblivious to something, to dismiss lightly or carelessly, is to not respect it. As the etymology also suggests, respect is responsive: we respect things that are worth looking at again, that merit our attention, that demand to be taken seriously. Let us delve quickly into some history of this concept.
Little background
The idea of respect for persons finds its roots in the culture and history of archaic Greece. For example, although he does not speak directly about respect, Plato has plenty to say about things that might fall under this general category. He holds that we must not harm others but always act justly towards them; he also attaches great value to love and to friendship, devoting three whole dialogues to these subjects. Aristotle, who also did not have a single term that equates with our notion of ‘respect,’ used the verb timaô and the corresponding noun timê. However, in Aristotle, timaô and timê relate either to a form of moral appraisal respect, the esteem for an agent’s outstanding moral qualities or to a form of appraisal respect such as honour, which means the attitude and conduct owed to a good statesman and other virtuous office holders. Therefore, timaô/timê are still not related to recognition of respect for persons, the recognition of the equal, inherent and absolute moral value of human beings qua persons, independently of their individual merit.
We owe the transition to such formulation of respect to the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his moral philosophy. Indeed, most contemporary discussions of respect for persons explicitly claim to rely on some aspect of Kant’s ethics. Central to his ethical theory is the claim that all persons are owed respect just because they are persons; that is, free rational beings (1988). To be a person is to have a status and worth that is unlike that of any other kind of being; it is to be an end in itself with dignity. And the only response that is appropriate to such a being is respect. Respect is the acknowledgment in attitude and conduct of the dignity of persons as ends in themselves. Respect for such beings is not only appropriate but also morally and unconditionally required; the status and worth of persons is such that they must always be respected. Because we are all too often inclined not to respect persons, not to value them as they ought to be valued, one formulation of the categorical imperative, which is the supreme principle of morality, commands that our actions express due respect for the worth of persons:
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or the person of any other, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end.
(Kant, 1988)According to the analysis of Giorgini & Irrera (2017), Kant distinguishes between two different kinds of respect. The first one, reverentia, is a special kind of feeling that a person experiences towards whatever is morally warranted and that will lead her to do what is morally warranted, provided that she has cultivated a calm state of mind. What is interesting, according to Kant, we can have a priori knowledge about when we are going to feel respect. He assumes that the insight into what the moral law demands and the feeling of respect are inseparably connected. Therefore, we know in advance that a person who gains moral insight will experience the corresponding feeling of respect. Regarding all other feelings, there is no way to know a priori which feeling we are likely to experience under which circumstances.
The second form of respect, observantia, is understood as a set of actions one has to perform in response to certain morally relevant features of persons, for instance, their dignity. While in the case of reverentia this acknowledgment takes place on the level of feelings and motivations, in the case of observantia it takes place on the level of actions.
What are the practical, everyday ways of respecting persons as beings with dignity? It ranges from everyday politeness to showing that we value others, to showing people that we value their time, to paying attention to their thoughts and feelings, and being interested in them. Respecting the dignity of persons also clearly rules out anything that humiliates, degrades or demeans a person—anything that implies that someone is less than respect-worthy.
Having provided these introductory words about differences between tolerance and respect, let us move on to the presentation of my teachers.
Francesca
A lady from a bygone era, middle-aged, and modest on the surface, enters my office. Taking a careful look, I noticed the age-old jewellery and its glistening stones. Her gaze is sharp and crisp, her face is lined with the wrinkles of tears and laughter, and she has a slightly curved, eagle-like, hooked nose. A hat on her head. An original figure, accumulating various time-spaces, I thought. She sits on the armchair and looks at me carefully. Her Sicilian family has a long military tradition. Officers, generals, the mighty. Her father was in the army, although no one ever knew what his exact job was. What was felt was a constant sense of danger. She said to me one day:
When it comes to our family… the white facade… and underneath, perversion, murder, war… it was really shocking… there were people in our family who had real power… power, but nothing good ever came out of it… either their own cruelty or they themselves becoming the target…Francesca was to become the next Mighty One. She managed to defy parental urges, studied at and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, and soon became a respected architect. She undertook various jobs in Italy, fulfilling her professional role, but her heart was elsewhere. She has always been interested in the world of magic, astrology, tarot symbolism, and world religions. She read with great passion the writings of Carl Gustav Jung and attached great importance to her dreams. Francesca tried to combine her education with her passion. For some period of time, she was engaged in the restoration of old buildings. She told me,
The twelfth century is my beloved time… science, esotericism and astrology went together and intermingled… only later have they violently been torn apart…Her parents insisted on her becoming a ‘real’ architect; they wanted her to give up her interests, get into the business side of art, stop living in the clouds. It may sound innocent on the surface, but it was very difficult for Francesca. Today I think she experienced their efforts as an attempt at lobotomy of the soul.” She puts it this way:
I have to deal with the scar and the big hole I have from them… I would like to be able to forgive… especially the fact that they have been trying to ‘ normalise’ me, to silence me…Not surprisingly, during the therapy, she dreamed that I, in another incarnation during medieval times, was a doctor who, driven by his own desire and the urging of her father, wanted to give her an actual lobotomy.Her dream, unfortunately, had some convergent points with reality. There was a period in our encounters where I simply tolerated rather than respected and was curious about her passion for astrology, hoping to restore her to a ‘fully functioning state.’ Her parents, although they were trying to tolerate her, in reality were perceiving her as a witch. And who is a witch, and what is witchcraft? Just to remind you, witchcraft was a crime in Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, a crime that could be punished by imprisonment, pillory, or execution. During that period, approximately 90,000 people were formally accused of witchcraft, and about half of this number were executed; that is, 45,000 deaths. Good reason to be scared if someone calls you a witch, isn’t it?At some point in her life, she left Italy and began to travel. She took on a variety of jobs in her profession, including architectural design of large retail spaces, and car dealerships, handling space and light.
Now I sit at work and attend meetings on how to display and illuminate products to make them sell better… gee, that’s not why I graduated… but I can pay my bills and do what I love…She learned to value her time after work. She started yoga classes, practiced meditation, learned tarot symbolism, and so on. I will honestly admit that I had different thoughts and feelings about this change in her life. As I mentioned, in my association, astrology and tarot functioned as something colorful, maybe even beautiful, but certainly not as a way of life for a decent, well-educated lady architect. I feared whether Francesca was slipping lower and lower in her functioning, whether she was degenerating socially and mentally consumed by some certainly serious disorder, which, however, I could not grasp. To make things worse, when I heard during one of the seminars the question “Who would like to be supervised today? I answered eagerly that I would appreciate it. This was not, in retrospect, the best idea. I have not appreciated it in the end. Pretty orthodox psychoanalytic supervision made it clear that, in fact, the patient Francesca was degenerating and that she needed to be restored to full strength by all means. Maybe more sessions, perhaps some meds, or even hospitalization…suffice to say that this whole meditative-esoteric jumble was to be understood, worked through, and, finally, said goodbye to. I returned from the supervision in some consternation. There was something seductive about it. The certainty of knowing the right path. On the other hand, however, Francesca did not exhibit behaviors that I could describe as destructive. She avoided addictions, she had a social life, and, as a foreigner, she found her way well into our harsh reality. I wondered why she sought psychotherapy. I believe that ultimately the goal was to remove the curse of the lobotomy and to receive respect and, later, to learn to give that respect to that part of her that did not want to live an ‘exemplary’ life, did not want to be a Mighty One. She did not want competition in her life; it was too much a part of her family’s tragic fate. There was a part of her that wanted to follow the path that Jung pointed out in his Red Book:
Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself?
So live yourselves.
Slowly, instead of just tolerating her interests, I began to get acquainted with them. Francesca became more courageous in talking about it, showing that while there is a great fear of being pathologized and rejected, there is no insanity in her. It is not a psychotic island; it is a love of mystery. It isa desire to know what cannot be known with a rational mind. It is an immeasurable imagination. It is a desire to find her own way to God. As we continued our meetings, I learned to respect her ‘irrational,’ magical world and support her in self-realization; after numerous courses, she started to teach meditation and put tarot cards after working hours, fascinated by their symbolism. On the other hand, having support for her different aspects, she could integrate them more into a good life. She now works very happily as a space architect, designing retail showrooms, and uses the possibilities her job offers to travel often, sometimes far, visiting ‘magical’ places.After working hours, she explores what she is eager to explore.Tolerance and respect are not separated by a narrow boundary. This is a very serious issue. I have learned that we all have our assumptions about psychopathology, about what is healthy and what is psychotic, including myself.When we respect differences instead of tolerating them, when we truly respect them, then we can avoid the trap of over-pathologizing the person.
David
A short young man with dark skin is sitting in the armchair right in front of me. He is dressed sportily, always in two or three layers of clothes, which masks his lean figure. He looks at me distrustfully during the meeting, usually remaining at a slight emotional distance, with a heavy load of sadness visible in his eyes. Sometimes he gets more talkative and starts to share with me his desires—he would like to stop being afraid of people, stop hiding his eyes in the street when being passed by, meet a woman, and create a relationship with her based on love and mutual respect. However, David’s greatest desire is to get rid of the frightening images from his head. For the past seven years, he has been traveling the world, seeking a return to mental stability and the opportunity to put his life back together. He has been living in different countries for a year or two. He came to Poland at the beginning of last year. An American of Pakistani origin, on life support despite his young age, he feels different everywhere.
The extramarital child of a brutal officer, after years of experiencing sexual abuse by his stepbrother, he enlisted in the army and went on a mission to escape the nightmare of home life. He trained as a mechanic and wanted to be helpful to his fellow soldiers. However, because of the color of his skin and his background, he was placed by them in almost one line with the enemy (he was being called a terrorist) and became an object of cruel jokes and behavior. He could not stand the constant humiliation, and his psyche, weakened by the traumas of his family home, collapsed. Recovered from a suicide attempt, he was discharged from the army with a lifetime pension. He maintains no contact with his former colleagues or family.
It is very difficult for him to make new friends. He sees danger everywhere; the words spoken by his tormentors are rumbling in his head. He feels that his body has been humbled; he hates it, he hates his appearance. He does not feel worthy of love and good treatment. He experiences feelings of fear and danger most of the time. When things are particularly bad for him, suicidal thoughts keep coming back.He has been attending individual psychotherapy for a year. Despite his experiences, and similar to Francesca, he has not lost the deep faith that he can make sense out of his experiences.
Why do I mention him? His story seems bright. Sorry, not bright. Simple.Why simple and not a bright one? That is right. Micro-racism. Microaggression. Micro-bullying. I could not understand these concepts for months. Neither I nor my loved ones had ever suffered persecution because of our skin tone, birth, education, or religion. Our relationship went well, and David gradually gained confidence. Over time, he began to open up to other people, started going on forest hikes with a group of people he got to know, got into dating and meeting girls. One topic, however, was causing us mutual frustration. Whenever the press mentioned religious or racial persecution or unfair treatment, or when someone in his circle of friends committed a faux pas, David would become furious. Fury stemming from a deep sense of misunderstanding, of feeling ignored.I understood; I empathized with the persecution he had suffered in the past—it was as simple as that. Bullying in the military, sexual abuse were easy to empathize with. But racial microaggression? Why did it make him so angry? His reactions to his friends seemed really exaggerated.I was often inclined to view his ongoing examination of history and identification with the suffering of all members of his social group, which suffered much persecution, as an escape from confronting the history of his own personal humiliation and persecution.
I was wrong. It was about both. We come from very different cultural backgrounds. How very different our roots are I only managed to comprehend on a recent trip through Europe. With my wife, Magda, and daughter Jasmine, we were wandering through the continent this summer with no particular plans. Fate directed us to Nantes. Parking the car on the banks of the Loire, we were completely unaware of the history of this city. We unpacked the stroller and went for a walk along the bank of the Loire. Between the Anne-de-Bretagne Bridge and the Victor-Schœlcher footbridge, the latter named after the man who contributed a great deal to the abolition of slavery in 1848, we found a huge planted esplanade measuring almost seven thousand square meters.We have immediately noticed numerous glass plaques distributed all along that esplanade. As we later found out, there were two thousand of them.Some are reminders of the seventeen hundred and ten slave trade shipments that left from Nantes, but the other two hundred and ninety gave the names of slave trading posts, ports of call, and ports frequented by the slave traders from Nantes on four continents. Gradually, with each step, I have begun to become aware of the huge scale of this tragedy. That was the moment I reminded myself of David and our misunderstandings.The open-air staircase led us from the esplanade to the underground passage, where we were welcomed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, behind which the word ‘freedom’ was written in forty-seven languages from countries that suffered from the slave trade.We followed the route and entered the underground passage, on the Loire on the right, a huge glass plate running along the ninety-meter length of the passage on the right. On the plate, we have found different, carefully chosen texts from all the continents affected by the slave trade, coming from five centuries—the seventeenth through to the twenty-first—and reflecting a wide range of sensitivities. Let me quote three, which made the biggest impact on me:
I then saw my sisters led forth, and sold to different owners; so that we had not the sad satisfaction of being partners in bondage. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us, begging of us to keep up a good heart, and do our duty to our new masters. It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing.
(The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian slave, related by herself, 1831, Bermudas)I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
(Nelson Mandela, Un long chemin vers la liberté, 1994, Afrique du Sud)For centuries this country repeated that we are brute beasts; that the human heartbeat stops at the gates of the black world; that we are walking manure hideously proffering the promise of tender cane and silky cotton, and they branded us with red-hot irons and we slept in our shit and we were sold in public squares and a yard of English cloth and salted Irish meat were cheaper than us and this country was quiet, calm, saying that the spirit of God was in his acts… I hear rising from the hold chained curses, gasps of the dying, the sound of one who is thrown into the sea…the baying of a woman giving birth… the scrape of fingernails advancing on throats… the sneer of the whip… the prying of vermin among weary bodies…
(Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, 1939, Martinique, Antilles)Magda and I were deeply moved. We both started crying while reading the information that nowadays at least 200 million people are victims of enslavement for debt, forced marriages, prostitution, and forced labor, including a significant number of children. The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, has stated that “slavery is a heinous crime. This type of exploitation is changing and re-emerging in modern forms.” It all means that the issue of slavery still arises today.The memorial to the abolition of slavery in Nantes not only commemorates the memory of the millions of victims of slavery of the past but also has the mission to recall the dramatic urgency of the situation of slaves today.I guess it pays off its debt, as it was the capital of the slave trade in France in the eighteenth century: it organized forty-three percent of the French slave trade shipments, and its ships deported around 450,000 Black captives to the American colonies.Only thanks to Nantes, I comprehended David’s feelings. Only thanks to David, I become sensitive to this particular area of human experience.He is absolutely right in his reactions. I was ignorant and paid little attention to this part of his story.
Kamila
A well-dressed, tall woman wearing artistic jewelry enters my office.Her forearms and hands are covered with subtle tattoos, including intricate patterns from the field of mathematics. She looks healthy; her overall look is appropriate to her biological age. She is fully aware during the encounter, making contact in a slightly submissive but friendly manner.Her way of thinking and drawing conclusions is above-average. At first glance, there is nothing to suggest that Kamila and the state of good mental health are separated by a gulf almost impossible to bridge.Until the age of fourteen, she lived with her parents. Her father, a heavy-drinking, stocky sailor prone to impulsive behavior in his youth, spent his middle age shuttling between home, occasional work cruises, and hospitalizations in a psychiatric hospital. Her mother, almost eleven years older than him, obsessively tried to maintain her attractiveness, making it the main goal of her life. At fourteen, Kamila, suffering from her father’s drunken, often aggressive and obscene behavior and her mother’s emotional abandonment, went overseas on a sports scholarship.The new reality, however, does not bring salvation. Not having internalized a positive role model of maternal care, she falls into the hands of a coach, an abuser who crosses all boundaries. Eventually she is raped and soon starts acting out. She begins to abuse alcohol, and, after using cocaine, her first severe episode of mania manifests itself. For the next twenty years, she was hospitalized many times in different countries. The longest periodwas in Germany, where she suffered further painful humiliations, includingbeing gang-raped and forced into prostitution. Currently, at the age of thirty-seven, Kamila is attending individual psychotherapy.Apart from PTSD, she suffers from bipolar and eating disorders, vomiting when painful memories flood her or when she experiences strong, incomprehensible emotions. She finally returned to Poland, lives with her parents in her childhood room with a desk where she tried to concentrate on her school duties, and slept in a bed where she covered herself with a quilt trying not to hear drunken libations. The childish, unicorn-patterned wallpaper also remained unchanged. Nevertheless, Kamila still believes that her life has meaning, despite the pain and humiliation she has experienced.She has been tolerated as a foreign teenager in a big, rich country. She has been tolerated in a way the young Palestinian lady was in Sweden.She tried many times to talk about the painful things that were happening to her, but the school headmaster did not listen. She was indifferent to him. Maybe he had already known about the coach’s behaviors but tolerated them for numerous reasons. Kamila had felt that neither the headmaster,nor her own mother, gave her respect. Her mother also betrayed her dignity by tolerating her father’s aggressive and obscene behavior at home. I strongly believe that the awful silence on the other side, the indifference, and the lack of respect for her were the turning points in her life. If she were treated with respect, if there were more respect than tolerance in her environments, her life would have been different.
Berat
I have been working with Francesca, David, and Kamila for a long time, and I believe these were beneficial years for all of us. As for Berat, I have not had a chance to talk to him many times and have met for nine sessions.He is thirty-five years old, comes from Turkey, and is seeking happiness in a polyamorous relationship with a Polish woman ten years younger.I do not have a good story here. I feel I have not been open enough to at least try to approach with respect his stance towards love relationships.In my defense, I can say that he has not been happy with Berry, his girlfriend.She was more ‘polyamorous’ than he, I guess. He was suffering a great deal when she was dating other men. He could not sleep when she was leaving home (they lived together), he counted her sexual partners and tried to apply rules that he hoped would lessen his suffering. The rules, however, were being changed over time, in a fashion that reminded me of the commandments from Orwell’s Animal Farm:
No animal shall sleep in a bed. *with sheets.
No animal shall kill any other animal *Without cause.
No sleeping two nights in a row with a new lover. *Except when
the new lover will be leaving the city.I felt that it was wrong. I remembered from school lessons how that novel ended. I did not want that for Berat. I felt that he was trying to fit into something that did not suit him. On top of that, I have quite a rigid view of love relationships and polyamory, seeing monogamy only as a social construct, and attempts to make polyamory a good equivalent of a monogamous relationship do not convince me. On the contrary, it contradicts the knowledge and experience I gathered in the past twenty years. I have tried, naturally, to be at least tolerant. It did not work out. Needless to say,soon many of my efforts went, more or less consciously, in a direction of either encouraging him to change the nature of his relationship with Berry or to quit it. That does not sound like good psychotherapy to me. I made a fundamental mistake; I tried to be tolerant instead of being interested in him, which would be a part of respect. I wanted to change him, not to know him. Of course, I have been following his suffering and my convictions about what is healthy, what is good. I still believe that, in most cases, polyamory is a modern fashion, a modern version of psychic retreat in Steiner’s sense. However, it should not matter. We all have a bond with our knowledge/convictions, and that would be a hypocritical lie to deny it.It is a part of our understanding; nevertheless, it should not stand in the way of respecting the person.
Conclusion
Time to wrap it up. The difference between tolerance and respect is essential for me. I believe that treating people with respect, that respecting the dignity of the person, is crucial for her mental health. If we approach this concept from a humanistic-existential perspective, a mentally healthy person is:
(a) Having a sense of the uniqueness of existence (emphasized by Frankl);
(b) taking responsibility for the freedom to create one’s life (Sartre);
(c) having the ability to care for oneself and the environment in which one lives (Tillich);
(d) having the ability to choose courage over despair in the boundary situation (Jaspers);
(e) having the ability to transcend (Rollo May);
(f) having a committed, faith-filled attitude toward values and one’s own goals (Kierkegaard & Allport); and
(g) having the ability to function in each of the three modalities of being: biological, relational, and with oneself (Umwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt– Heidegger).
I consider this perspective to be the most complete because it draws on the processual context of mental health. As Kępinski (1978) states,“a person…is in the process of becoming.” We are not a mathematical constant; we fluctuate over time. We are in the process of constantly wandering towards fuller humanity; we peregrinate through time and into new spaces.And if we fluctuate, there must be a symbolic Rubicon beyond which a person falls into madness or some ‘lesser’ mental illness. I postulate that what causes the crossing of the Rubicon is very frequently the actual loss or threatened loss of a sense of personal dignity.Concepts of mental health, if they do not imply sensitizing actions for the present and future generations, will be just empty, nothing-contributing theories. Every effort should be made to emphasize its connection with dignity and respect for a person.We never know how close to the Rubicon the person we are talking to is or how we can push them over the symbolic bridge at Savignano or turn them back from that path.When Gaius Julius Caesar decided to cross the Rubicon via the bridge at Savignano in 49 BC at the head of the Twelfth Legion of Gemina, he was actually deciding to avoid a series of public humiliations and degradations.The famous words “Alea iacta est” started a civil war that we can understand as a war to preserve dignity.The symbolic Rubicon, let us say again, also occurs in the psyche of every person, separating health from mental illness.Any human being can be pushed to cross the symbolic Rubicon through lack of respect, kindness, hostile, undignified treatment, or extreme, obvious emotional or physical rape. That is why I choose robust respect instead of mere tolerance.
