Aleksandar Fatic

The conclusion summarizes the ways in which Modal Integrative Psychotherapy (MIP) may be seen as revolutionizing conventional psychotherapy by introducing the idea of “switching modal worlds”, not just within the subjectivity of the client, but also “worlds”, as sets of circumstances described in modal logic, within which subjective experience occurs. Such a shift of emphasis from an essentially subjectivist position to a fundamentally more ambitious conceptual approach to both lived experience and psychotherapy challenges certain conventional norms, including the blurring of the distinction between “reality” and “subjectivity” and the notion of how different experiential worlds might or might not be called into actual experience by the use of MIP technique.

Joseph Agassi’s last book, The Philosophy of Practical Affairs, offers a comprehensive look at key philosophical topics and doctrines with a common focus on the role of rationality, the evolution of rationality and the relationship between rationality and akin phenomena. A key topic he addresses is the relationship between rationality and magic. This dichotomy reverberates on a number of areas of applied philosophy, including philosophical practice and philosophically informed psychotherapy. Agassi’s views on magic offer a fundamentally rationalist view of the phenomenon of magic, however they open up significant inroads into nuanced insights of how magic can be seen as a cognitively significant complement to rationality in the strict sense.

The paper examines the concept of individual and collective value identities based an emotionalist understanding of values. The main perspective it discusses is one where emotions are the most important practical instruments for the clarification of individual and collective values. The argument implies that moral emotions are not irrational, but have a logic of their own which can reliably pinpoint the persons’ value system; emotions are thus crucial building blocks of an ethics which is able to enhance personal and moral identity. This particular ecology of moral emotions is pivotal in crisis periods, such as the global pandemics, wars or system crashes, either economic, or political, security, diplomatic or cultural. In the current circumstances, where the already shaken individual and collective values throughout the world have been shaken by the Covid 19 pandemic, understanding identities as fundamentally couched in moral emotions may be critical to saving our cultures and our legacies of social and moral capital.

This chapter focuses on how language, and what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “language games”, are factored into everyday thinking, psychotherapeutic interventions, and the modal theory of therapy. The way in which psychological structures that are reflected in language are played out in the therapeutic narrative reveals not just the difficulties faced by the person in therapy, but also the moral assumptions and confusion that require a particular philosophical resolution in the intimate community between the therapist and client. The chapter discusses how the nature of therapeutic community as a value community influences the client’s and the therapist’s perceptions and use of language and, in turn, how the growing quality and intimacy of that community is articulated in the therapeutic narrative.

The paper deals with a perspective of Christian philosophy on artificial memory erasuse for psychotherapeutic purposes. Its central question is whether a safe and reliable technology of memory erasure, once it is available, would be acceptable from a Christian ethics point of view. The main facet of this question is related to the Christian ethics requirement of contrition for the past wrongs, which in the case of memory erasure of particulary troubling experiences and personal choices would not be possible. The paper argues that there are limits to the ethical significance of contrition in the writings of the leading Christian fathers on the theme, where excessive suffering and inability to forgive oneself for one’s actions is an impediment to the achivement of tranquility of mind and spiritual redemption, rather than a prerequisite for it. The paper thus concludes that there is no hindrance in principle from the Christian ethics point of view to pursuing a voluntary and selective memory erasure as a psychotherapeutic technique once a fully adequate technology is available.

The paper discusses the conceptualisation of mental disorder as a representation, rather than an illness, and relates this perspective to the modern understanding of mental health as a healthy »narrative« or life story. The author proceeds to briefly consider the evolution of concepts of illness in psychiatry and a gradual reappearance of Lacanian psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The key concepts of Lacanian psychotherapy pave the way to a growing together of standard psychotherapy and modern philosophical practice within the novel concept of integrative psychotherapy.

This chapter discusses the role of trauma in both modern psychotherapy and modern culture, relating the emphasis on trauma to the prospects of developing the attributes of sound mental health, including resilience. While trauma is an undeniable experience of many, the culture of trauma in psychotherapy presents trauma not merely as an experience coupled with a particular perception and interpretation that leaves a long-term mark on the person, but also as a normative element in psychodiagnostics and therapy. In this perspective, trauma is increasingly seen not only as an event and its reception by the person, but as a hypothesis, a potential explanation, and a prerequisite for treatment, so that trauma is sought as a potential explanation of difficulties that do not initially present as traumatic. The chapter introduces two methods of responding to trauma, the Flow Model and the Concert Model, and elaborates on the role of organic relationships and micro-communities in addressing trauma.

The Introduction outlines the key differences between the traditional use of propositional logic in psychotherapy and modal logic as the logical foundation of Modal Integrative Psychotherapy. One of the main differences between the two is that, while the emphasis of traditional psychotherapy is on changing the client (thus the subjective experience of the world), modal logic (and, correspondingly, Modal Integrative Psychotherapy) ventures into seeking to change the modal worlds, or “possible worlds” as sets of circumstances outside the person that determine the person’s experience of reality. This introduction points at the role of sociality as a normative foundation of our perceptions and self-perceptions and sets the stage for a fuller discussion of key elements of modality in the theory, interventions, and overall methodology of Modal Integrative Psychotherapy.

The paper examines the concept of individual and collective value identities based an emotionalist understanding of values. The main perspective it discusses is one where emotions are the most important practical instruments for the clarification of individual and collective values. The argument implies that moral emotions are not irrational, but have a logic of their own which can reliably pinpoint the persons’ value system; emotions are thus crucial building blocks of an ethics which is able to enhance personal and moral identity. This particular ecology of moral emotions is pivotal in crisis periods, such as the global pandemics, wars or system crashes, either economic, or political, security, diplomatic or cultural. In the current circumstances, where the already shaken individual and collective values throughout the world have been shaken by the Covid-19 pandemic, understanding identities as fundamentally couched in moral emotions may be critical to saving our cultures and our legacies of social and moral capital.

The paper explores the extent to which Epicurean ethics as a general philosophy of life can be integrated in a composite pragmatist approach to philosophical counseling. Epicureanism emerged in a historical era that was very different from the modern time and addressed a different philosophical ethos of the time. This alone makes it difficult for Epicureanism to satisfy all of the normative criteria for a modern ethics. On the other hand, the paper discusses aspects of the modern ‘external’, duty- and demand-driven ethics that may contribute to the emergence of some of the main issues for modern philosophical counseling. The author points out aspects of Epicurean ethics that are potentially powerful tools to address the issues of mood and meaning in philosophical counseling, and thus serve as a contemporary complement to a complex duty-bound, yet pragmatist view of ethics