All in the mind

All in the mind

If you were asked to feel love for a beloved one, where would you feel it? In which space? 

Has the question flummoxed you? Well, it flummoxed us when Dr Lucas Derks posed it when we met him in the city recently. 

The pioneer in Mental Space Psychology (MSP) was in the country to hold workshops on the subject and also explore the Indian way of life. Coming back to the question, Dr Derks asked us to focus on the feelings for our loved one and the space where we feel it. Says Dr Derks, “Space is the primary organising principle in the mind. The MSP has two elements. One element is academic research in spatial cognition. It’s how people orient themselves in space, how they find their way, how they think. Then, there is psychotherapy that makes use of space. This is not related to research and so they don’t know each other. The mental space psychology connects the two.”

HOW IT ALL BEGAN
A social psychologist, Derks was about 27 and studying when he came across ethnotherapy and neuro-linguistic psychotherapy (NLP), cognitive behaviour therapy. “I started to look at how can I work on social, psychological aspects. That’s relationships, primarily human relationships. It took from mid-‘80s to mid ‘90s, before I had an idea and the idea is simple — the relation is the location,” he says. 

Elaborating on it, The Netherlands-based psychologist says, “You may have one loved one or multiple loved ones and you could have different relationships with them. We study these spaces and the patterns within them. This is where we started exploring what we call social panorama, the landscape of people around you.” 

The social panorama model is a socio-psychological instrument with which you can change someone’s unconscious map of relational reality. Without being aware of it, you have fixed your position in society in your social panorama. “In this model, interpersonal relationships are explained as cognitive constructions in mental space; we project people onto a mental location, and that location determines the quality of the relationship. Problems with intimate relationships, self-confidence, conflicts, power, families, teams and organisations can be relatively easily analysed and solved with the help of the social panorama model,” he adds. 

CREATING A FUTURE
“When a person complains about somebody in authority, then you can be sure that authority is somewhere here (gestures to his head level). The person has this mental image, and is probably not aware of it. The result is that the person feels submissive and shy. And, when they move it (the image) down, they don’t feel shy anymore. This is the basis of mental space psychology,” says Derks. 

He then goes on to speak about time factor. “People will spend time in space and the future (gestures ahead) and past behind them. This is very common. But some might see their future there (down), and may not think much of it. When I offer you a job with New York Times, for instance, you will pop create an image in future — ‘I will be a star reporter’. You don’t know you do that (image creation) and go ‘wow!’ When people are depressed, they don’t have this kind of image creation. They don’t see a future. We work to create a future. Sometimes the easiest thing that you could do is to say ‘five nice things’ that could happen or would like to happen to you and place them in the area where the future should be. This may change the feeling,” Derks elaborates.  

Should this image creation be commensurate with the abilities that you have? What about confidence? Answers Derks, “My point is that self is always there. So when you have a very negative idea of yourself or see yourself as stupid, ugly, then these images are existing somewhere. They do not stand out dramatically. And, that’s where we work on. One of the patterns teaches how to create personal self image, a better self image. So that you start to like yourself.” 

PAST AND FUTURE
What role does past play? Are we referring to episodes from our childhood here? “The past is different from future because it affects your present. You work on it, reconstruct it by thinking about it. But you don’t need your imagination to create it. It’s created by your experience. You may have traumatic experiences in the past, but they are in your present, somewhere around you and then it also affects your future,” says Derks adding, “This could lead to repression. When asked to describe depression, people say “it’s dark and grey”. We look at this dark in great detail and from the stance of neuro-science, we can say that these are signs of repression. The brain sends darkness when it’s repressing something.” 

COUNTRY SPECIFIC PATTERN
Dr Derks has been visiting many countries, especially Germany, United Kingdom and Finland, in course of his work. When asked if there was any country-specific pattern of awareness, he replies, “I was looking for that too. I have been to Japan three times and the self images of people there are smaller; they have less self awareness than US citizens. The Americans are more self-oriented people. The same methods could be applied everywhere, up till now. We tried it in Bali. I was in Australia last year. The tribals, ancient civilisations are aware of spatial representations. The idea of mental space has existed in African civilisations. There are lots of clues to believe that the zulus had these rituals. But it needs to be explored by anthropologists.” 

How do we lose this ability, we ask and Dr Derks points out, “Maybe the tribals still know, but they don’t know it in the way we put it, the science behind it. They had no TV or any distraction. For this work, we need to be sensitive and they are. We need to be aware of how people create their thing. The African civilisation has continued for 40,000 years, the changes of continuity in the psychology is huge. This can be a great project.”

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