Despite claims that CBT is all very scientific, magic plays its part — and this is not trickery, sleight of hand, or illusion, but real magic of an ancient kind.
Magical thinking is a particular type of ‘category error’ that human consciousness makes us particularly vulnerable to. When I write ‘vulnerable’ I don’t mean to imply that magical thinking is always harmful. In many circumstances it can act as a kind of useful shortcut, but in other circumstances it can cause trouble. This post is about trouble.
A ‘category error’ is a mistaken belief in which something is not just identified wrongly, but is identitified as a member of an inappropriate category. For example, suppose you spend the day with your friends Alfie and Betty, and their cat, Zorro. Aflie makes the tea. You might say, “Alfie made the tea!” That statement is correct.
You might say, “Betty made the tea!” That statement is wrong. It is an error, but it is not a category error. Betty is in the category of people who might have made the tea. It’s just that she didn’t make the tea on this occasion.
You might say “Zorro made the tea!” That statement is wrong in a different way. Zorro is a cat and could not conceivably have made the tea. It’s not just that you picked the wrong cat. The whole category of cat is inappropriate here. If you really believe that Zorro made the tea, then magic must be involved.
In practice few people believe that cats can use their magical powers to make tea. Most magic involves not cats, but thoughts.
Alfie has made tea many times. He can do it almost without thinking about it. So when, in the middle of a lively conversation, someone thinks it would be a good idea to have tea, the next thing Alfie knows is that a pot of tea appears.
It seems that thinking about the idea of tea leads directly to the pot of tea appearing. It seems like that because Alfie is not consciously aware of his role as the agent in making the tea. He might agree that he must have made the tea, but he doesn’t actually remember making it.
Life is often like that. We remember an initial thought, and we see a final result, but we don’t remember the steps in between in which we acted to produce the result. It seems as if the thought produced the result directly, without agency.
That process, of not seeing the intermediate steps, is as old as consciousness, which focusses attention on what seems important and makes us unaware of detail that can be inferred if required. This magic is as old as thought itself.
When things seem like that, we have a choice. We can choose to infer the intermediate steps, saying “I must have done that.” Or we can choose to believe that the intermediate steps really did not happen — that the thought really did magically produce the final result.
It’s not wrong or harmful — most of the time — to use magical thinking as a kind of shortcut to avoid having to think through all the steps. Magic is so commonplace and embedded in consciousness and culture that it would be almost impossible to avoid in any case. But there are times when something goes wrong with the shortcut, and then there can be big trouble.
A closely related form of magical thinking centres on words. Words have the power to evoke thoughts. That is not magical in itself, because that is why words were invented. But if you believe that thoughts can magically affect the world directly, you might also believe that words can magically affect the world directly.
A word evokes a thought, the thought leads to action, and there is some result:
Now elide the intermediate steps:
When you are unaware of the thought that the word evokes, and unaware of your agency in producing the result, it seems like the word causes the result directly by magic.
Symbolic gestures and symbolic objects are just like words. They can evoke thoughts, and so they can act magically just like words:
Symbols, however, can transfer their magical power to related objects — symbols of symbols. For example, if the cat is magic and the cat is black and furry, then perhaps the cushion, which is also black and furry, is also magic. If the square black cushion is magic, then perhaps all squares are magic.
Of course if you really think all squares are magic, you are quite mad. But that’s what we are about here, exploring the boundary between ordinary modes of thought and mental illness.
These mechanisms all have in common that they depend on our tendency to pay attention only to the start and end of a chain if causation, and to be unaware of our own agency and perhaps even our own thoughts in producing the end result. So if we fail to infer the intermediate steps, we can make a category error and attribute a thought, word or symbol as the direct cause.
In therapy, magical thinking is sometimes the cause of a patient’s problems. Not always, but sometimes. For example, suppose Betty was badly scalded as a child when a teapot fell over. The chain of causation was:
Now Betty’s mind does what human minds often do, and fails to register the intermediate steps:
Betty now has a phobia. The thought of tea, hearing the word, or seeing something like a mug that symbolises tea, evoke a feeling of shock and fear. China mugs and cups transfer their magical power to similar white shiny objects. By the time Betty presents for treatment, she is having to go to the toilet in the dark to avoid its terrible white shinyness. She washes herself at the stainless steel kitchen sink and she eats and drinks from plastic plates and cups made for campers.
So therapists look for category errors (amongst other things) when they explore a patient’s problems. A category error indicates that intermediate steps in a chain of causation have gone missing. By using inference to reconstruct the missing steps, the error can be corrected.
In therapy, Betty remembers a time when she was not afraid of china. And then the next thing she remembers is being afraid. What happened in between those times? Well, there was the incident with the teapot… Was the feeling she had after being scalded the same as the feeling she has now when she sees white china? A similar feeling? Could it be the same feeling, evoked again after all these years?
Correcting magical thinking is not a matter of unthinking some ‘bad’ thought. The original thought was a perfectly good one. It’s just that some intermediate steps in a chain of causation went missing. And this, too, is a perfectly good mental process. It’s just that on a particular very significant occasion it went wrong, and the resulting category error caused a distorted pattern of thinking that manifested itself in mental illness.
When magical thinking can be identified and corrected, it leads to some of the most dramatic recoveries that CBT can produce, because once the original chain of causation is reconstructed, the patient’s symptoms just — oops, I almost wrote ‘magically’ — vanish. Some patients do require behaviour therapy to mop up patterns of behaviour that they have established to compensate for their distorted thoughts, but others just wake up the next day in a different world where everything slots into place.
Magical thinking in CBT has a dark side too. That’s when the magical thinking affects the therapist. You might imagine that therapists would be somehow immune, but it is not so. The academic way in which CBT is often taught, and the modern emphasis on ‘evidence-based’ approaches elevate the power of words and of those repositories of words, books and research papers.
So consider a therapist, Colin, faced with a patient, Dave. As Dave tells his story, Colin tries to make sense of it. But patient’s stories are often difficult to make sense of. There can be false trails, things forgotten, things not said.
The session ends and Dave goes away. Colin’s pen hovers over his notebook as he tries to sum up what he thinks about the case. He has a choice about what to think — does the solution to Dave’s problems lie within Dave, or does it lie within a book?
The books on the shelf have a seductive power. They claim to contain solutions. But those solutions only seem to work if you forget the chain of causation that produced them. They are magical solutions, words in books curing the patient in the chair opposite, a category error.
Words in books are not wrong. They are a useful shortcut. It is a useful shortcut to do your research on a bunch of patients, and to make generalisations based on what you find, and to communicate those generalisations to your colleagues in written words. But if your colleagues forget that chain of causation, and imagine that your words apply directly to their actual patients, that is no more than magic.
This dark magic now threatens CBT. Time and again you read that CBT is ‘all about bad thoughts’ or ‘evidence based’ — forms of words that claim power over reality. Will reality prevail, or will magic?