The word “insight” reigns supreme in therapeutic environments. It connotes an “ah ha” moment and deep, perhaps new, understanding. “Knowledge,” however, receives less attention. The word may actually carry an unfair burden because therapists tend to subordinate “knowing” to “feeling.” Interestingly, “feeling” often connotes a strange kind of knowledge, one present in the idiomatic expression, “I know it, but I don’t know it, you know?” Here, knowing means feeling, internalizing, acting upon. Thus, while I might know (cognitively) that I am a good person, I don’t yet know (feel, believe) it, as is evident through sheepish and/or self-defeating behaviors. The work of the therapist seems to be to attend to the client as he/she/they forms insight, such that the client, fully supported by the therapist, comes first to understand the difference between knowing and knowing, and then acts effortlessly in life such that the knowing bodies forth through behavior. But what does this therapeutic attendance look like? Once supported, how exactly does the client reframe knowledge such that it ceases to be remanded to the field of useless cognition and transmutes itself into the realm of useful belief and behavior? The answers to those questions pass through the terrain of insight, but they require understanding “knowledge” in a more precise way.
​
The two 20th-Century French philosophers whose work helped me refine my understanding of knowledge are Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. The latter, writing about the former, explains that knowledge occurs by bridging two realms, the visible (i.e., the seeable) and the articulable (i.e., the sayable). For Foucault, knowledge does not exist until that which is visible unites with that which is sayable. And this union is no easy feat because each domain is governed by its own rhythms. Artworks provide clear examples of these different rhythms at work.

René Magritte, Les monde des images (1950)

​I hung a print of this Magritte painting in my office for a while and I used it as a diagnostic tool. I was curious about which clients noticed it, commented on it, questioned it, and attempted to analyze it. Fewer than half of my clients acknowledged it at all. Those who looked at it for more than a few seconds said nothing about it. The small number of people who spoke about it were divided into two unequal categories. The first group, larger in number, made superficial comments, such as “That’s a cool picture.” The second group, including maybe 2 or 3 clients total, produced questions like, “What’s going on with that?” If people said anything about the painting at all, I would ask a series of questions. “Tell me, what do you see?” “What do you make of the broken glass?” “The title is ‘World of Images,’ why do you think it’s called that?” Exactly 0 clients ventured in-depth answers to those questions, and the same number arrived at anything resembling an analysis of the picture. As such, there was no knowledge produced during their engagement with the image. That is, the realms of the visible and the articulable were not bridged.

Not bridging the two realms took a tremendous amount of restraint on my part because the painting produces knowledge that is, in 100% of cases, relevant to people engaged in therapeutic work. The gestalt of the scene conveys a familiar experience, one that some people may even describe as beautiful or calming: A sun setting or rising over/from the ocean horizon. The familiar starts to become strange when one notices that the view of the sun is framed by a broken window. A little bit of thinking leads to the realization that the presence of shards of glass inside the room suggests the window broke inward, i.e., something from outside broke the window. But this logical line of thought breaks, too, since the shards of glass reveal an uncanny detail. The shards are not transparent pieces of glass. They seem to have retained the image of the setting/rising sun. Interestingly, the journey of the eye across the canvas leads from the center of the sun down towards the shards of glass, and if the eye keeps moving in that direction it will leave the canvas and encounter the caption that holds the painting’s title: The World of Images. Magritte has provided the domain of the seeable (the painting) and the domain of the sayable (the painting’s title) but has not bridged the two. The bridging, which I’ll call thinking, is the work required to produce knowledge of the painting. Clients in therapy benefit from undertaking precisely this work—both of this painting in particular and of knowledge production generally—because the strangeness of “the world of images” is usually one of the distressing aspects of daily life that brings them into therapy in the first place.

The work required is not that of making the normal (sunset/sunrise) strange (as seen felt in the view of the shards retaining that which was seen through the window), but, rather, of acknowledging the strangeness of the “world of images” and the work of knowledge production typically glossed over by habitual actions (such as, for example, the act of looking). The world outside the room is a world of dynamic forces. The forces seem to have broken inward through the glass. More than that, the image of the sun has burned itself upon the glass, much like light impresses itself upon the film in the production of photographic images. But when the eye returns to the plane dividing the interior and the exterior of the painted room, it returns with a worry. On what now are the forces of the world impressing themselves? My eyes? Who’s to say they won’t burn and break my eyes? Of course, that’s not possible because none of this is as it seems. This is a painting. The force of my seeing is producing each and every “fact” of the painting in front of me. I see broken glass, but there is no real broken glass. I see an impossibility in the form of a scene of the world imprinted upon glass that once framed the same scene of the world, but there is no impossibility here since there is no “real world,” only an image of it. The force of my looking is meeting the force of the The World of Images pressing in against my eyes. My awareness of this illuminates the materiality of my encounter with the painting, which is to say the materiality of thought. Or, as Magritte said in a letter to Foucault, “thought is what sees and can be described visibly” (cited in Deleuze, Foucault, 49). In a beautiful touch, Magritte frames his window with curtains that are reminiscent of those we might see framing a proscenium stage in a theatre. We have here a pictorial dramatization of the theatrical performance of seeing and being seen. 

The theatre event replays itself on a daily basis in a profoundly mundane fashion. I believe that some external force is producing distress in my life. The distress is akin to the burning force of the sun that shatters the glass, throws shards inwards toward my intrapsychic fortress of solitude, and produces a disturbing, nightmarish wrinkle in the fabric of my daily life. As Epictetus pointed out millennia ago, however, it's not things that upset us, but our judgments about things. The supposedly external circumstances that bother me are known entirely through how I see and interpret them. The change one seeks will rarely take place in the world “outside;” rather, it will take place through a process of seeing differently. To return to Deleuze and Foucault, how I say and thus define what a problem is will change once I see the so-called “problem” in a new way. The knowledge of a “problem” is always multifaceted, and yet we typically hold ourselves in one position and continue to appraise the problem from a single degree of perspective instead of circling the problem to encounter the other 359-degrees.

Liu Cixin’s 2006 novel Three-Body Problem (三体) leapt into the imagination of Americans last year when Netflix transformed it into a series of the same name. As with most compelling sci-fi stories, the plot produces an uncanny eeriness by blending an outrageous scenario with themes that are hyperrelevant to people in the present moment. In this case, the themes of perpetual surveillance, the irredeemability of the human race, techno-authoritarianism, and the failed ideals of intellectual progress all hit pretty hard. So even though Liu is confronting his readers with a story of alien invasion, he’s really commenting on something we know too well; namely, humanity is suffering a slow death. What will save us? Math? Science? Extraterrestrials? 
​
Even though readers can easily side-step the nuances of the physics and mathematical problems named in the book’s title, I’d like to argue that therapists could benefit from slowing down and grappling with the complexity of the 3-body problem. Why? If you have clients suffering from “co-occurring disorders,” then you effectively have clients suffering from a biopsychosocial three-body problem. 
Consider that term, which therapists use all the time but rarely deconstruct: Bio-psycho-social. Three “bodies” acting upon and within one individual client. We assess our clients’ biological, psychological, and social circumstances as if each of those “dimensions” was exerting its own physical power over the person whose problems we’re helping to navigate. If we add the spiritual dimension, then a fourth “body” enters the picture and the scenario gets even more complex. 

As it turns out, the n-body problem of the Bio-psycho-social-spiritual dimensions of our client is a perfect analogue to the mathematical three-body problem highlighted in Liu’s novel. Mastery of Newton’s laws governing gravity and motion help us map the complexities of one planet orbiting another body, such as the sun. But when another body exerting its own gravitational effect enters the picture, Newton’s laws start to become less helpful. In fact, once a third-body enters the celestial picture, it becomes impossible to accurately predict the precise motions of bodies. As such, it becomes impossible to develop certainty about the effects of each body upon the other. This mathematical problem becomes a “real” problem if you live on one of the “bodies” tangled in the 3-body celestial orbit. And if you’re thinking that such phenomena are relegated to the world of sci-fi, I will politely redirect your attention to the chaos of the biopsychosocial-spiritual reality in which you’re ensconced and point out that, hey, you’re gonna need to brush up on your “math.”

The answer is lebensform, but to understand it we'll need to know the question.

Clients in the worlds of substance abuse and mental health therapy tend to share a dislike for slogans. I've played around with this in the group therapy setting by asking clients to only speak in AA slogans, using no other words. "It's all about people, places, and things for me. Just doing the next right thing, taking it one day at a time." Everyone laughs because they think of that one person at the AA or NA meetings who sincerely talks like this. When we pick the phenomenon apart, we get to the conclusion that the general dislike of the slogan and the sloganeer comes from a feeling of insincerity, as if the "bumper sticker" language misses something unique about each client's circumstance. 

And there's the rub. Each person is unique, and yet each person also shares a surprising number of similarities with other people. We are bound together through our cultural affiliations, and we develop our sense of belonging through shared language that helps to identify us as part of the group. Slogans in fact come from this very fact. Why do AA slogans exist? People repeat them as proof of the organization's effectiveness. If you know the slogan, then, theoretically, you know the process that leads to a full understanding of the slogan, and if you have that full understanding then you are likely on the road to recovery. Sadly, however, the slogans can produce the opposite effect. They can be wielded as reprimands that suggest a failure has occurred. If only you understood the difference between progress and perfection, then you wouldn't have relapsed. Or, it sounds like somebody forgot to let go and let God. When words like these are transmitted and received in a careless way, then they can produce the opposite effect for which they were intended. The same is true for mental health problems. Tell a person with anger issues to slow down or count to 10 and you might get punched in the face. Or tell someone with a personality disorder that they aren't working from a Wise Mind and you could get your tires slashed. How do we make sure that we're using language to validate individual difference and promote group belonging instead of accidentally invalidating the unique person in front of us and spurring feelings of alienation?