Metanoia (from the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, ''metanoia'', "changing one's mind") has been used in psychology since at least the time of American philosopher/psychologist

William James William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the lat ...

to describe a process of fundamental change in the human personality. The term derives from the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

words μετά ( ''metá'') (meaning "beyond" or "after") and νόος ( ''noeō'') (meaning "perception" or "understanding" or "mind"), and takes on different meanings in different contexts.

Developments

William James used the term metanoia to refer to a fundamental and stable change in an individual's life-orientation.

Carl Gustav Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philo ...

developed the usage to indicate a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form – a form of self healing often associated with the

mid-life crisis A midlife crisis is a transition of identity and self-confidence that can occur in middle-aged individuals, typically 40 to 60 years old. The phenomenon is described as a psychological crisis brought about by events that highlight a person's grow ...

and psychotic breakdown, which can be viewed as a potentially productive process. Jung considered that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as an

existential crisis In psychology and psychotherapy, existential crises are inner conflicts characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning. Some authors also emphasize confusion about one's personal identity in their definition. Existential crises are acc ...

which might be an attempt at self-reparation: in such instances metanoia could represent a shift in the balance of the personality away from the

persona A persona (plural personae or personas), depending on the context, is the public image of one's personality, the social role that one adopts, or simply a fictional Character (arts), character. The word derives from Latin, where it originally ref ...

towards the

shadow A shadow is a dark area where light from a light source is blocked by an opaque object. It occupies all of the three-dimensional volume behind an object with light in front of it. The cross section of a shadow is a two-dimensional silhouette, o ...

and the self. Jung's concept of metanoia was an influence on

R.D. Laing Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illnessin particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of ...

and his emphasis on the dissolution and replacement of everyday ego consciousness. Laing's colleague, David Cooper, considered that "metanoia means change from the depths of oneself upwards into the ''superficies'' of one's social appearance" – a process that in the second of its three stages "generates the 'signs' of depression and mourning". Similarly influenced was the

therapeutic community Therapeutic community is a participative, group-based approach to long-term mental illness, personality disorders and drug addiction. The approach was usually residential, with the clients and therapists living together, but increasingly residential ...

movement. Ideally, it aimed to support people whilst they broke down and went through spontaneous healing, rather than thwarting such efforts at self-repair by strengthening a person's existing character defences and thereby maintaining the underlying conflict. The Dutch psychiatrist Jan Foudraine wrote extensively about it, tracing its history through the work of Jung and Laing, and eventually considering it “a permanent change in gestalt.” He cites an example where one sees a black vase, then one blinks, and instead one sees two white faces in profile opposite each other (the

Rubin vase Rubin's vase (sometimes known as the Rubin face or the figure–ground vase) is a famous set of ambiguous or bi-stable (i.e., reversing) two-dimensional forms developed around 1915 by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin. Another example of a b ...

). In

transactional analysis Transactional Analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social interactions (or “transactions”) are analyzed to determine the ego state of the communicator (whether parent-like, childlike, or adult-like) as a b ...

, metanoia is used to describe the experience of abandoning an old scripted self or

false self The true self (also known as real self, authentic self, original self and vulnerable self) and the false self (also known as fake self, idealized self, superficial self and pseudo self) are a psychological dualism conceptualized by English psychoa ...

for a more open one: a process which may be marked by a mixture of intensity, despair, self-surrender, and an encounter with the inner void.

References

External links

* {{Cite web , title = Achieving a Metanoia , work = Jungian Center News , accessdate = 2010-01-20 , date = 2009-07-06 , url = http://jungiancenter.org/essay/jung%E2%80%99s-timeliness-and-thoughts-our-current-reality , url-status = dead , archiveurl = https://web.archive.org/web/20120426061656/http://jungiancenter.org/essay/jung%E2%80%99s-timeliness-and-thoughts-our-current-reality , archivedate = 2012-04-26 Analytical psychology Personal life Philosophy of life Midlife crisis

Developments

See also

References

Further reading

External links