My Writing Style and Influences

It took me many years of regularly editing my books before I achieved a readable style. Most of my books were written in the late 1990s, before I put them on the internet from 2002 onwards (then because of a difficulty that came my way, I took them off the internet in 2014). In terms of stylistic clarity, the two thinkers who most influenced me were Freud and Nietzsche.

An issue that a male writer faces is that of using masculine pronouns. The only pronouns in English that are non-sexist are passive and plural ones, plus “you” and “I”. These are all right for short articles, but a long book for a serious audience cannot be written using these alone. So the main pronoun that I use is “his”, since I am male. I occasionally use “his” and “her” to give a little variety.

It is easy to write superficially on any topic. This way any contradictions in the writer’s thinking remain hidden from view. My basic style of thinking is pattern thinking. This means that all my ideas have to be coherent or consistent with each other: any contradictions indicate flaws in my understanding.

It is not too difficult to achieve coherence in any one particular topic of interest, for example politics. The difficulty comes when attempting to extend ideas from one topic into other ones. So ideas about power in politics need to be coherent with ideas about power in religions and in relationships and in the family, in sexuality, in ethics. Such coherence is difficult to achieve.

My ideas arose from my long psycho-analysis. I began writing them down in my notebooks. When a person does this, then he can see where ideas link together and where they don’t, and where contradictions appear. Contradictions can lead to two different thinking styles. The most common style is to accept the contradictions and be satisfied with obscure sections in one’s explanations and descriptions of ideas. The obscurity serves the function of hiding those aspects of the writer’s ideas that he does not fully understand. Such a thinker is usually labelled a difficult thinker (or sometimes labelled a profound thinker), since the reader has difficulty in understanding him.

The alternative style is to try to solve the contradictions. This can be very hard to achieve, since the thinking processes have to plunge into deeper levels of the mind. But this is the only way to attain lucidity in one’s explanations and descriptions. My rationale for adopting this style came from one of Freud’s axioms – this is the view that if you have a psychological problem that troubles you, then by fully understanding that problem it will cease to have any significant effect on you. A problem can only be fully understood if the thinker has achieved lucidity in the analysis of it.

Sources and Inspirations

The First Factor
The starting points of my psychological explorations were always the theories of other thinkers, principally Freud, R D Laing, Nietzsche, Carl Rogers, plus others such as Rollo May, Erich Fromm, Rudolf Steiner. An alternative perspective was provided by Buddhist theories of the mind, together with the ideas of Paul Brunton. Brunton was a western yoga practitioner and philosopher, from whom I first came across the idea of philosophical idealism (which is the idea that all phenomena are products of the mind). This idea amazed me. The amazement was that science could be taught at university without mentioning an equally-valid alternative explanation of reality.

The Second Factor
This was the process of inspiration. This is difficult to understand. What appears to happen is that my higher self (the spiritual aspect of me) generates a stream of inspiration in me. This allows me to generate novel ideas and associations from the material that I am reading or reflecting on. These novel ideas are coloured by my prejudices and wishes. Therefore, at a later date, I have to edit these ideas in order to try and remove these limitations. Since I am focused on a very high level of independence from both traditions and traditional theories, my higher self almost never presents me with information directly; instead, I have to work out my own conceptual presentation of the creative flow of inspiration, in a way that reflects my experiences. Hence I am both intuitive and empirical.

Another way to view the process of inspiration is that of form and content. The stream of inspiration generated by my higher self is the form. The ideas that I produce and work with are the content.

The stream of inspiration for a thinker and writer is unlike other abilities: to develop it, one has to get in the mood for it. I developed a single-minded obsession with understanding what lay “underneath” my beliefs and attitudes. I presumed that these were emotions. I had almost tunnel vision; I could not leave any particular problem alone until I had made some progress on it. Then I could turn to another problem. So sometimes I had one problem going through my mind for months on end.

This obsession prepared the way for the eventual flow of inspiration which would give an insight into that problem. My psychological distress was the ferment from which an insight eventually came and relieved, to a varying extent, that distress. Most psychological problems have many factors to them, and so require many instances of insight to fully understand them.

The Third Factor
This is the process of justification, the need to validate one’s attempt to repudiate an injustice that one has suffered or can empathise with. Why did I write my books? During my 40s and 50s, when I went through endless years of very deep self-analysis, I found that the ideas being created in me often bore little resemblance to traditional ideas of consciousness, spirituality and ethical philosophy. So the most important drive in me was that of justifying my own perspective on reality.

During the early 1990s, when I was constructing my theories, social psychology appeared to be the dominant mainstream psychology in England. In nearly all the books on it that I read, it was suggested that individuality did not exist. Typically, the reasons given for this view were that the child grows up in a family (which is a social group), learns a language (which is a social phenomenon), and has to relate to other people all his life. Therefore individuality is repudiated since it is believed to be a fiction; it is assumed that there is only a social fabric to life. I used to find this belief very upsetting, and in order to refute it I focused on explaining individuality at the expense of social concerns. I initially produced an ego psychology, though later I accepted that I overdid this presentation. I removed some of this emphasis during later editing, leaving me with what I consider to be a balanced view of individuality and social centredness.

Justification presents a particular problem to a writer. He needs to consider how his writings will affect other people. Since my writings often concentrate on very difficult psychological problems, I have to think about how a reader will react to my ideas. How should I present an analysis? How can I be critical without being discouraging? The fault line within traditional moral beliefs is that of needing to blame people. However, a deep analysis reveals that although people cause problems, they are not usually to blame for them. The only way to transcend the need to blame is to set deep psychological difficulties within the context of personal evolution, using reincarnation theory (this means that each person does not live just one life; he or she lives multiple lives on planet Earth). That way, a person can see how some problems are automatic products of the conditions under which each person has to evolve (such as the difficulties of childhood).

The Fourth Factor
A spiritual life requires the adoption of a code of ethics, yet the ideas that are needed to overcome the deep problems within an ossified social system sometimes require the freedom of thought that only a period of immoral “decadence” can bring. I became an adult during the 1960s hippie era. This was the inspiration for me to sideline conventional beliefs, adopt an independence of mind, dump the primacy of science, and pursue my own lifestyle.

Influences of Freud, Rogers, Laing, and Jung

I greatly admire Freud, and it is to him that I owe the inspiration to cultivate a clear writing style (he was a marvellous stylist when he wanted to be). Jung dealt mainly with symbolism and myth, as far as I remember. This is useful for exploring the major ideals or themes that drive human aspirations or yearnings. But it does not really explain motivation. Symbolism or myth is the intermediate step between ideals and motivation. To understand how the subconscious mind works with patterns (or symbols), it is necessary to dig deeper and explore basic motivations.

However, motivation itself is a weird arena. Freud looked at some of it in his explorations of neurosis, and he came up with ideas that are still unacceptable to most mainstream psychologists even today. Yet even Freud had to rely on symbolism to some extent.

What is the problem with basic motivations? Motivations that are positive ones present no difficulties for us. The difficulty resides in our negative motivations. Our negative motivations are usually too unpleasant for us to face directly, so the subconscious mind bundles them together into symbols and myths that we can accept. Most people find it easier to work with symbols and myths than with basic motivations. For example, we may think that it is rather glamorous to be on a personal odyssey, when in fact we would be shocked if we discovered the real motive for being on our odyssey.
In my first attempts to understand how the mind works, I faced two main issues: those of symbolism and vocabulary.

Symbolism
If I discover a definite process that occurs in the subconscious mind, then I can teach it strait-forwardly. But if I rely on symbolism then I am interpreting a process or a pattern. It is not easy to teach someone else how to make interpretations. Hence it can be hard for other people to verify that my interpretation is correct. For example, Freud was brilliant at interpretation of symbolism, but how many of his followers had the same gift? - Answer, few, if any. So I decided to avoid relying on symbolism as much as I could. I preferred to dig deeper into the mind and find out what the symbolism was based on.

A Technical Vocabulary
Freud and Jung sometimes use different terminology to explain the same ideas. Plus the fact that counselling psychologists like Carl Rogers use different terminology yet again. And then you have thinkers like R D Laing and Rollo May using many existential ideas.

During the middle part of my self-analysis I had to decide what terminology to use. The procedure that I adopted to compare these thinkers was to interpret Freud in ways that I could understand and which fitted my own experiences, and then find what interpretations of Rogers and Laing fitted with Freud. That way I could compare these thinkers. I found this process extremely hard to do. On an intellectual level it was very tiring. For some time I chopped and changed the vocabulary that I was using, before eventually settling down to my present one.

Basically, what I was doing was this: when I was absorbed in some experience, I then explored which ideas best described it. The Ariadne’s thread that I followed was: what did Freud mean in this kind of situation, what did Rogers mean, what did Laing mean? In essence, I followed meaning. This comparison of thinkers took me a long time. Each of them is brilliant in some ways and muddled in others.

Jung has never really interested me. To be fair to Jung, by the time that I had adopted a working vocabulary of ideas after comparing Freud, Rogers and Laing, I was nearly intellectually exhausted. I did not feel like making an extensive study of Jung, especially as Jung was the most difficult and obscure of the theorists to read.

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Ian Heath
London, UK

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.	Style and Coherence During the time when I researched a lot of academic writings in psychology and philosophy, I found that many books were written without much ability in presentation and literary style. So when I began turning my ideas into articles, I worked on developing a clear writing style. To achieve a good writing style takes plenty of practice over a long period of time. It is not easy to come by. I developed my style by regularly editing my articles over several years. Each time I began another edit, I concentrated on removing obscurity: I would take the most difficult and obscure passages and work on them to make them more intelligible. At the next edit, I focused on the passages that were now the most difficult and worked on them. This editing routine enabled me to remove the obscurity from my writings and to make my ideas as easy to understand as possible; it was a hard struggle, because it forced me to attain clear thinking.
Sub - Headings
Sources and Inspirations
Influences of Freud, Rogers, Laing, and Jung
A Technical Vocabulary