The Operative Path – Part 2
Psychology, Eco-Systems, and the Craft of Becoming a Person
This article deepens the critique of modern psychology by showing how it amputates the psyche from its technical and cosmic environment. Starting from Jung’s acknowledgment of psychology’s self-referential nature and Roszak’s eco-psychology, it argues that most psychological theories operate within the narrow spectrum of urban-industrial life, reinforcing repression and conformity while neuroses proliferate.
Using images such as city traffic, football matches, and dance, the text reveals an “invisible” dynamic that only appears under chaos, play, and stress, where gesture becomes the true indicator of personality. Against the static setting of the consulting room, operative traditions work directly with these dynamics through ascetic disciplines of craft, music, and engineering understood as ingénierie: revealing the genius latent in matter. A personal experience in Galician factories, where handwriting and work were inseparable, leads to the conclusion that genuine personality emerges only when ego is dethroned and gesture, work, and cosmos are allowed to configure the human being.
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(continuation of Part – 1)
Psychological Types and the Self-Referential Psyche
Contemporary psychology still relies heavily on “psychological types”. Personality tests appeal to systems such as the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, 16 types), the Big Five (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), Jung’s typologies, and so on. What all these frameworks share is the assumption that personality is a universal trait that can be identified through conceptual, psychological categories. Yet very few psychologists or therapists are willing to admit that modern psychology, from Freud to the present, rests on a principle that begins to crumble as soon as one learns to live and think operatively. C. G. Jung already pointed to these fragile foundations when he wrote in Psychology and Religion (1962) that “the psyche is the object of psychology and, unfortunately, is at the same time its subject. We cannot ignore this fact”.
The “unfortunate” element, for Jung, lies in the fact that modern culture as a whole has become self-referential. The paradigms that shape our particular standpoint determine the very features we believe we observe in the psyche. If we asked someone today to describe a camera, their answer would likely be confined to an external, epistemological description and would ignore the internal architecture of the device, an architecture inseparable from the technical possibilities of a given era. In other words, it is reasonable to assume that a culture tends to see itself through the lens of what it is technically able to build. If today we interpret everything as “information” it is because we now possess cybernetic systems capable of processing the world in those terms.
Eco-Psychology and the Cage of Urban-Industrial Life
One of the most lucid critics of modern American culture, Theodore Roszak, coined the concept of eco-psychology to expose the limits of the psychological paradigms that have dominated since Freud. Eco-psychology argues that it is unrealistic to separate human nature from external nature. To insist on such a separation is as naïve as believing that a lion in a zoo cage is the “real” lion, when in fact it is only a weakened reflection of itself.
Roszak repeatedly stresses that the illumination of the psyche depends on the “spectrum” through which it is lit. If psychology assumes that human beings are motivated exclusively by instincts, fears, phobias, repressions, socioeconomic attachments, and so on, then only these motivations will appear in the field of vision. This psychoanalytic spectrum is extremely narrow because it is confined to the boundaries imposed by urban-industrial societies: boundaries that reinforce self-control, repression, and social conformity. This collective repression is necessary to preserve the social order required by an industrialized economy to be functional. Once again, we cannot separate the individual psyche from the technical conditions in which it is embedded.
Even without entering into a full analysis of those technical conditions, we know that most people’s self-image simply mirrors their context: someone condemned as immoral in a puritanical setting may be praised as liberated in a more permissive one. Genuine psychological development cannot ignore this decisive role of context. Yet modern psychology, obsessed with the individual and largely blind to contextual and technical factors, has driven itself into a dead end. The explosion of psychological disciplines has not prevented the spread of neuroses; on the contrary, by severing the psyche from its technical environment, it has contributed to aggravating them.
Thermodynamics, Traffic, and Collective Action
Just as the true behavior of a wild animal cannot be understood outside its natural habitat, human personality cannot be understood in isolation from the specific cosmos of which it forms a part. Individualism and liberal ideologies persuade us that human beings are “original”, independent units, but a serious study of the technical conditions that make a society economically viable shows something else: it becomes necessary to assume dense, aggregated bonds of action among individuals in order to hold off the threat posed by the second law of thermodynamics to economic processes.
For this convergence to occur, there must be an intrinsic alignment in how a society acts under conditions of chaos and stress. A simple image illustrates this: if we observe traffic in a large city, we see the apparent diversity of people and vehicles, yet in their actions a powerful collective agreement emerges. Without that implicit agreement, no order would be possible, and the chaos induced by the second law of thermodynamics would end up prevailing, with highly problematic consequences at the economic level.
Invisible Dynamics: Play, Stress, and the Limits of Therapy Rooms
The traffic example is, above all, a material projection of a dynamic that operates in an invisible domain. By “invisible” I mean something precise: if a football player is standing still in front of me, I cannot see his style or level of play. To perceive that, I have to place him in a match –a playful environment- dominated by chaotic situations, where what was invisible begins to become visible. It does not appear as a “picture”, but as movements, reflexes, and choices that largely escape conscious control.
In such moments, the human body becomes the material support of a dynamic that far exceeds the individual. It is therefore not absurd to say that a great ballet dancer does not simply “possess extraordinary skills”, but that, if we examine the conditioning factors and determinisms at work in the art, we can almost certainly affirm that “such a dynamic possesses the dancer”.
All this phenomenology remains largely foreign to modern psychology, which is typically practiced in static settings: patient and therapist seated, exchanging words. Under these conditions only a tiny portion of the invisible “threads” that govern action in play, chaos, and stress can be observed. Operative traditions, by contrast, recognize these threads and address them practically, not speculatively. They assume that authentic development is possible only if one learns to follow the language inscribed in these conditioned actions.
Factories, Craft, and the Handwriting of the Ancestors
On a personal level, my encounter with traditional operative disciplines began around the age of twenty-two and unfolded gradually. It started when I discovered a few factories in Galicia that still operated according to principles remarkably close to those of alchemy. Here I understand alchemy in its most technical and operative sense, not as the symbolic, mystical, or “collective unconscious” construct popularized by Jung.
The workers in these factories knew the word “alchemy”, yet they never used it. They preferred the word “craft” (Spanish: oficio) which for them meant something very concrete: no separation could be drawn between their personalities as workers and the products of their labor. In those environments I often felt like Charlie in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What most deepened my sense of wonder was that, at the time, I was an industrial engineering student, intellectually trained to see every process as determined by laws, causality, and mechanical relationships.
I soon realized that these workers seemed to live beyond chronological time and Cartesian space. Their actions on the materials, as they themselves admitted, were essentially the same as those of their ancestors. The nature of their gestures and their reactions in situations of chaos and stress clearly exceeded those abstract limits. One of the most striking aspects of my experience as “Charlie” was discovering that their handwriting always displayed very defined, coherent forms. This was one of the reasons I began to suspect that there was something irreducibly operative in the art of handwriting, as I formerly presented in this article. And I can´t deny the fact that handwriting analysis contributed very powerfully to detect or recruit around me professionals, scientists, and writers who developed their work based on operative disciplines.
Cosmos, States, and the Raw Material of Personality
In operative traditions, not only the modern concept of information and science are considered relative and secondary, but the very dilemma outlined by Jung is resolved in another way. These traditions hold that the configuration of the cosmos into States is what allows us to situate and define all living beings. A simple example helps clarify this operative principle: if I keep an exotic plant at home, modern science can assist me in conducting a biological and genetic analysis of its characteristics. Yet in doing so, I apply to the plant the same identification process that psychology and modern medicine apply to human beings: I reduce its identity to the material schemes of biology. If I truly want to understand the essence and health of that plant, I must instead study its functional participation within its tropical ecosystem, that is, within a self-developing cosmic context. Only such a study allows me to define what the plant is as a function of its participation in a wider development that far transcends its biological traits.
In a similar way, an operative tradition offers the human psyche the possibility of configuring itself according to a much broader development than that allowed by reductionist and materialist sciences. As I wrote in a previous article, the need for such configuration only appears when an individual has undergone a chaos of adventures that have mobilized emotions, passions, loves, and fears beyond the narrow expectations that society assigns to its members.
It is no coincidence that the eclipse of operative traditions in modernity has gone hand in hand with the progressive “encapsulation” of the individual within an ego that can take on the most diverse forms and yet sterilizes the potential for development that those traditions can shape. If we apply operative principles to the conditions of contemporary society, we are forced to conclude that the dominance of the ego (in social networks and beyond) and of virtual reality radically undermines the formation of personality. Very few individuals today can be described as “persons” in the strong sense: a configured whole of genuine and free experiences. What we mostly encounter are individuals with a highly varied repertoire of emotional, temperamental, sentimental, intellectual, characterological, affectionate, physiognomic, sexual, genetic, and other tendencies. These tendencies are the raw material that operative disciplines could use to build the architecture of a personality, but which can equally be covered and camouflaged by an artificial ego or identity, even for an entire lifetime.
Gesture, Ascetic Work, and the Genius in Matter
If we manage to unlock the treasure of operative traditions in contemporary society, we are led to a concrete conclusion: human gesture is the first and most reliable indicator that the architecture of a personality is either well defined or in the process of being defined. In the modern West this principle is almost intolerable, yet in cultures once shaped by Zen traditions or indigenous cosmologies, the link between gesture and archetypal personality is taken as self-evident.
In what remains of those worlds, it is understood that the symbiotic development of the gesture–personality pair requires disciplined activity, conceived in a strictly ascetic sense: the aim is to understand firsthand the techniques that govern a given kind of work. The ascetic attitude reveals itself in the deliberate elimination of the craving for productivity and efficiency. What our society worships as the ultimate aim of all work is, in an operative domain, an obstacle to development.
Take a simple example: a violinist or pianist cannot truly communicate with the qualitative nature of their instrument if they approach it with the same efficiency-obsessed mindset that dominates engineering and most technical fields today. To such an engineer, playing an instrument is “unproductive”, pure entropic dissipation of mechanical energy into sound without complying with any function. Yet when the musician genuinely assimilates the instrument’s vibrations into their gestures, those gestures become a kind of magnet: they refine the instrument, draw out a more coherent configuration, and integrate it into wider musical architectures. The power of this magnet lies beyond the jurisdiction of the conscious intellect; it operates as a bridge between past and future, between fate and destiny.
Our hypothetical engineer will then be surprised to discover that the new configuration sought by the musician has high added value and attracts more capital than the abstract pursuit of functional efficiency. Ascetic activity, far from implying misery or scarcity, orients work toward authentic richness.
If, in engineering work (industrial, aeronautical, or otherwise), we were to relegate the obsession with efficiency and rigid functionalism to a secondary role, we would quickly enter a domain very close to that of traditional operative disciplines. This domain would resemble the original meaning of engineering, linked to the French ingénierie: the art of revealing the génie latent in materials once efficiency is no longer the tyrant and dissipation is allowed to unfold.
Here we step into the realm of true invention and individuation: the creation of new architectures that cannot be predicted in advance, just as one cannot deduce a finished poem from a mere list of words. The word “poem” itself comes from poiesis, which also points to this mysterious, formative creativity. Operative disciplines give access to such mysteries because our interaction with tools and techniques becomes a mirror in which the mystery of ourselves is reflected. Through them, personality is configured using the substance of genuine experience as raw material.
In this way, operative disciplines not only reveal the genius of the external world; they simultaneously reveal the genius of our inner world. They escape the categories of “introversion” and “extroversion” so dear to modern psychology, because they demand an open, finely tuned attention to technical reality outside us, while stripping away the persuasions of the ego. Through this double movement, they shape our inner world and allow a true personality to emerge.
(continue to Part 3)
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