The outstanding Christian psychologist Fyodor Efimovich Vasilyuk is remembered by his student and colleague Marina Filonik, a psychologist, psychotherapist, member of the Council of the Association of Understanding Psychotherapy.
He gave birth to psychotherapy
Marina Filonik
In 1999, I entered the psychology department of the former Lenin Pedagogical Institute, I wanted to be a consulting psychologist, I naively thought that they would teach me this (they didn’t teach me practice there, although I still found a good base in terms of higher psychological education).
I was lucky, at the university I was raised in an academic environment, but, in connection with the churching that happened at the same time, I looked for authors who worked in the direction that is now called Christian psychology. I read books by Boris Sergeevich Bratus, for example.
Of course, I knew about Vasilyuk, but quite little. However, it turned out that she entered the graduate school of Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, where Fedor Efimovich was the dean. Then I accidentally got to a seminar in which he took part. I remember how almost immediately after the seminar, on the steps between the floors, we started talking and he began to invite me to work at the faculty. It was strange proposal, because by that time I was working as an HR specialist in a marketing company. I then thought: “Well, who am I and who is Vasilyuk? Why does he need me? Moreover, several years before that, I myself asked to see him, I don’t remember in what capacity, and he behaved very distantly.”
And now for some reason he spent a long time persuading, inviting, if not luring, to work for the faculty. And gradually it happened: at first I worked part-time, then I left the company completely... The main thing is that I somehow didn’t rush to work with him then. He himself looked out, chose, lured... and brought me into psychotherapy.
In general, I once went to the psychology department with the motivation to be a practical psychologist, that is, to help people. But by the end of my studies, being already an Orthodox person, I painfully, but ultimately confidently decided that in my case, psychotherapy would conflict with my ideas and principles about the spiritual benefits of people. I categorically rejected this idea, deciding that science and teaching are possible, but practice - sorry, I definitely won’t.
And then there was the “Understanding Psychotherapy” workshop, where Vasilyuk invited me. I went to his workshop in doubt, almost reluctantly, reluctantly, again asking for the blessing of my confessor. But everything that I heard there turned out to be so consonant with me that it can be called an experience of absolute YES. This was a real conception and birth into the profession.
I was so “rushed” that barely having completed the first stage of training, although this is not customary, I began consulting at the “Mercy” service. Suddenly and unexpectedly, what I had been praying for for so long happened: “Tell me, Lord, the way, and I will go there.” Thanks to Fedor Efimovich, I began to do this and continue to practice psychotherapy to this day.
He spoke from a vast inner depth
If someone asked for his prayers, he would get involved very seriously. I heard about this from others, and then I saw for myself his prayerful participation when. Fyodor Efimovich was very involved in the dates of his parents’ deaths, and every year I knew that on these days he prayed with me. And then I had new troubles, difficult resuscitation, but every time he responded again and again, as he did to the troubles of everyone who turned to him. Each time, for a person who found himself in a difficult situation, he organized a collection of money in an envelope at the faculty. From the outside it seems that this is a simple and obvious thing, but this is precisely what characterized Fyodor Efimovich. This is such an amazing feature.
The last time, in the spring of this year, I became seriously ill, and Vasilyuk himself had been seriously ill for a long time, but he tried not to talk about it. He could no longer collect the “envelope”, as usual, and simply transferred my personal money from card to card. Many people helped me a lot then, for a month I lived on the money that came to me - sometimes I didn’t know from whom, and now I’m very grateful to everyone - I couldn’t work then. But a small detail - his amount was the largest among the rest of the donations. I am sure that if he could do it anonymously, he would make sure that I did not know about his amount. He was just already very sick.
He had a fantastic level of energy, an amazing vigor that did not leave him until the last. I don’t know where he got his energy and strength from, especially since he had no breaks in work. He was a dean and was often the last to leave the faculty. There were no breaks in his schedule, he worked non-stop and didn’t even have a minute to go eat. Some kind of disembodied spirit. He drinks a cup of tea and runs on. Students, rector, meetings, graduate students, full-time, evening, undergraduates... and all this ad infinitum.
But if you got an appointment with him, if you suddenly got a unique opportunity to have a snack together, or even just go down the stairs together to several floors within the walls of the Moscow State University of Pedagogical University, walk three steps from the university to the Sukharevskaya metro station, then these minutes and seconds that he was present with you – were two hundred percent presence. It doesn’t matter whether the discussion was a personal issue, or scientific issues, a dissertation, grants, exercises for students (and I worked for many years side by side with Fedor Efimovich as a teacher of the “Understanding Psychotherapy” workshop). These minutes were a time of absolute inclusion and complete presence. He was with you - here, all of him. And from this depth of presence words were born that became very important to you.
Remember how the Psalms say: “Out of the depths I have called to you, O Lord.” Fyodor Efimovich spoke from a huge internal depth and therefore his words fell into your own depths. This shared presence was one of the most cherished feelings that people experienced around him.
It was similar to how they describe Bishop Anthony of Sourozh, who had the ability to be present with everyone as if this person was the only one and unique in the whole world. Vladyka openly called for this, and Fyodor Efimovich followed. Moreover, he deeply loved and revered Vladyka Anthony. They had some kind of personal and special connection.
Sometimes I turned to him on personal issues, as a parent and, if I may say so, as a confessor. Vasilyuk was an authority for me as a Christian, as a spiritual child of Father Viktor Mamontov, as a man of deep inner vertical. I turned to him with questions that I had no one else to go to with. My mother died when I was fifteen, then my father died. And in my world, Fyodor Efimovich became a parental figure. He was like a mother to me because he had the kind of acceptance and empathy that mothers usually give. He was my father, because in relation to me he had a sober, firm, confident position and at the same time completely careful. I received his support in all difficult and critical moments during the time that we knew each other and worked together. I always turned to him - it could be an SMS, a call, a meeting - and every time he responded and got involved.
Fyodor Efimovich was a parental figure for many of my colleagues at the faculty and in the workshop. That is why we are all experiencing orphanhood so much now. There is no other figure of this scale. Even close, even approximately, even with a gap - no.
He helped people get up
He had amazing property not only to help prayerfully or financially, but to sympathetically be involved in the fate of a particular person, which is called “cleaning up the poor.” There have been many cases when, upon discovering a person in critical situation, crushed by life, he took him by the hand and lifted him, brought him closer to himself, and through this rehabilitation took place.
The idea of occupational therapy was close to him in that in a good way, when they give not just personal support, not fish, but a fishing rod. In a difficult situation, he could easily hire someone to work for the faculty, although this did not seem entirely appropriate. Or, for example, invite you to a training program. Our colleagues had an ambiguous attitude towards this, because we are fighting together for the quality of education, and here in the group they find themselves strange people.
But giving a person a chance, not rejecting anyone - this was very much in the spirit of Vasilyuk. “He will not break a bruised reed and He will not quench the smoking flax...” (Matthew 12:20). Fyodor Efimovich always gave a person a chance if it was in his power. Especially if it concerned people from the church environment. IN study group It could easily have been an aunt who was working behind a candle box, or suddenly some priest, far from psychology and psychotherapy.
Fyodor Efimovich's faith in man was always a little higher than the height of the man himself. This can be compared to the pedagogical principle: look not at who a person is now, but at who he can be and who he can become. This view of growth increases the chances of growing. And all these “wretched people” suddenly found themselves, thanks to Fyodor Efimovich, in training programs, in master’s programs, in bachelor’s programs, in workshops, and even among us, colleagues, at work. Fyodor Efimovich gave difficult people the most simple work and it was occupational therapy and the most effective rehabilitation program.
Well, why, you ask? These are weak employees, and from a business point of view, generally useless and strange people. But this incredible trust in people was the basis of Vasilyuk’s value-based attitude towards a person, which made it possible not only to support, but to elevate a person so that he could stand on his own feet. And this was very consonant with the view of Bishop Anthony.
But, of course, don’t get me wrong, all this was without extremes - he still saw the real capabilities of a person, that is, the employees still worked, and the students still studied. And the faculty for the most part consisted of very serious professionals.
The teacher conveys not only knowledge, but himself
His concept of levels, registers, a kind of layers of consciousness is one example of how the geographical past was reflected in the concepts of his school. It seems that Vasilyuk was completely, head over heels in psychotherapy in the broad sense of the word. He did not have many clients - psychotherapeutic practice was not his main activity. The scale was much wider.
Science and education are the main concern and personal pain of Fyodor Efimovich. He dreamed that education would be of high quality, and serious specialists would eventually emerge from under his wing; we produced and plan to produce a one-piece product. He did not pursue mass appeal, but cared about the quality, thoughtfulness, relevance of programs, and the methodology of training and practice. Of course, he himself gave brilliant lectures and conducted real master classes (from the word Master), but not even them, but science and education as such, supervising research grants and creating serious educational products (for example, first a faculty, later - master's programs) was the main investment of his strength, energy, and thoughts.
In recent years, his interests have increasingly leaned towards Christian psychology. This is my personal hypothesis, but, apparently understanding his condition, he devoted himself to science, as if he felt that he did not have much time left. He wanted to talk about the main thing. And Christian discourse increasingly became the main thing in science for him. Show me serious scientists who would engage in Christian psychology today not at the level of practice in the office, but at the level of methodological understanding. There are practically none.
In his latest publications, he actively discussed precisely the place in history, the point on the geographical map of the psychological field where Christian psychology can be located. They made a serious attempt to define how it is now. It was important for him to see and understand the perspective, including the methodological perspective of the development of Christian psychology.
There are teachers, there are teachers, and there is Fyodor Efimovich - Teacher, Master with a capital letter. And in this capital letter everything is concentrated at once - his scale as a scientist, professional, author and creator of the school of Understanding psychotherapy, his personality and his influence on me. Real Teacher cannot be a professional without personal depth, without that very quality of presence, without internal verticality. In psychology and psychotherapy, there are studies that study the effectiveness of psychotherapy different schools. But they all agree that what ultimately works is the personality of the psychotherapist, and not the school he represents.
It seems to me that in our field, more than in others, the teacher is the one who conveys not only knowledge, but in many ways himself, and through this the approach and the school. Otherwise, in our age of Internet technologies, we could have studied only from textbooks for a long time. In practical psychology this is impossible. You need a personality that conveys spirit, life, and not just a formula. That is why Vasilyuk was categorically against what is fashionable now distance learning when it comes to psychotherapy training. He was convinced that it was impossible to teach therapy from a distance. Mastery can only be passed on from hand to hand. And he did it.
I was lucky enough to study with him during the years when he taught the entire course “Understanding Psychotherapy”. The presence at the work of the Master, when in the literal sense of the word he conveyed with himself what he spoke about and what he professed, most of all resembled imprinting, when you grasp the subcortex, skin, spinal cord and I still don’t know which organs, and you carefully take the experience from hand to hand.
What he did was consonant and personally significant for me, it resonated with me so much that I want to continue doing what he taught us. Now we are faced with an important task so that the school does not die, lives and continues to develop. And this will be and will remain the subject of my concern and personal prayers.
“Love is always nailed down”
It was ten years ago, maybe more, around 2006. I was still studying in the “Understanding Psychotherapy” workshop when one of the most difficult periods of my life. It was associated with another deterioration in my father’s health and some ups and downs in hospitals. I no longer remember what I said, what I complained about to Fyodor Efimovich, but I remember the words that literally stuck and remained to live in my heart forever.
He suddenly started talking to me about the Mother of God, saying that we call Her the Ever-Blessed, and blessed means happy. But what is this highest degree Is the Mother of God so happy that she stands at the Cross and sees Her Son being crucified? She sees the death of her own child - blatant, cruel, bloody, merciless, unfair. She is present to everyone, and we call Her the Ever-Blessed! What kind of bliss is this? And then he answered his own question: “Love is always nailed down.” He put these three words into my heart very deeply, I quote it verbatim now.
You can think about this conversation for a long time. But this was in the spirit of Vasilyuk, in the spirit of understanding psychotherapy: we do not eliminate the problem, we do not say that there is no grief, but the situation is simple. On the contrary, we acknowledge the tragedy and say that we know the truth. And this truth is a way out to another level. As in philosophy, the problem disappears when you name it. By naming it, you move to a new level.
In general, Fyodor Efimovich talked a lot about death and grief. This topic was often raised in class. But the words he said then - “love is always nailed down” - do something to me now, when I acutely experience the loss of my Teacher. I remember how he said them then, how he spoke about the Mother of God, and I try to turn to Her, so that She would help me survive this moment in which I stand and mourn the death of my Teacher, as She stood at the death of Her Son.
Photo from the archive of Vladimir Mikhailov
PRAYER AND EXPERIENCE
Suffering, worry, consolation
Due to the nature of my work, as a psychologist and psychotherapist, I constantly have to meet with a person experiencing a crisis, at a dead end, at a turning point in life. Therefore, the topic that I would like to propose for discussion is the Christian anthropological understanding of the tragic aspects of human existence, the understanding of the existence of a suffering person. “The riddle about man,” wrote Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern), “...does not dare to be a shepherd is limited only by the moral categories of good and evil, holiness and sin, but it very often goes into the areas of suffering and tragedy, conflicts and antinomies.”
Suffering is always a challenge to our mind, heart, and faith. The Church responds to this challenge on different planes: on the theological plane it is Orthodox theodicy, on the ascetic plane it is the feat of bearing the cross and enduring sorrows, on the plane of spiritual care it is the consolation of the suffering. The experience of consolation in sorrow is the main subject of our reflections. It is easy to understand the interest of an Orthodox psychotherapist in this subject. As a practitioner, he takes not a cognitive, but a participatory position in relation to a suffering person, therefore, of the entire body of sources of Christian anthropological knowledge, the most important thing for him is to think about the church’s experience of helping the grieving and consoling them in suffering.
The correlate of the philosophical category of suffering on psychological level the concept of experience appears. Experience in modern psychology is conceived not only as something experienced, a direct given to consciousness of its contents and states, but also as inner work, mental work. Grief cannot simply be experienced as we experience annoyance, surprise or fear; it must be experienced, long and painful mental work must be done to restore the shattered or lost meaning of life, and the work of sadness must be done. It is no coincidence that in the word “suffering” itself, the root “strada” means “hard work, strained labor” (see V. Dahl’s dictionary).
One apocryphal text says: learn to suffer, and you can not suffer. From this point of view, to console a mourner is not to try to cancel, to abolish his suffering, but to help him in his spiritual work of experiencing grief. Paradoxically, it’s like this: to console is to help suffer.
Types of Consolation
Before turning to the analysis of the experience of consolation, it is worth recognizing the questions with which we approach this experience.
If for this context we identify the concepts of psychotherapy and counseling, considering both broadly: psychotherapy - not as special, but as any kind of spiritual support, and counseling - not as a special pastoral service, but as a general Christian duty of compassion, mercy, care for the soul of one's neighbor , - then we can say that every Christian often finds himself in a psychotherapeutic position, or a position of counseling, in relation to his neighbor. Why? M. M. Bakhtin wrote about three types of ethical reactions to the misfortune of another - assistance, advice and sympathy. There are situations where we cannot help with deeds: we are not able to restore health, cancel a sentence, or resurrect the deceased. We cannot usually rely on our own advice in a difficult, knotty situation - where, exactly, do we get wisdom from? This means that most often we are left with only one option - sympathy, compassion for a person in trouble. But how can our sympathy avoid the danger of remaining just a sentimental reflex, just an expression of our own emotional hurt by the suffering of another? How can our compassion not slip into pity, which can spiritually weaken and offend a person’s dignity, and how, having started from pity, not lose cordiality and fall into cold edification? How can we remain Christians in the matter of compassion, so that our consolation is truly spiritual care, caring for the soul of a suffering person?
Let's look at some examples.
One of my patients once told me his story of seeking help during an acute family crisis. One bad evening he learned about his wife's infidelity. After painful sleepless night he went to work, but he couldn’t work, he couldn’t find a place for himself, his whole life seemed to him to have collapsed, everything had lost its meaning, physically felt heartache didn't let me concentrate on anything. He left the building and almost unconsciously went to the temple, being at the same time a non-believer. After listening to the confusing story, the priest asked:
Is your marriage consummated?
- No.
-Are you baptized yourself?
- No.
- And the wife?
- Also no.
- Do you believe in God?
- I would like to believe it, but no... It seems not.
Well, what do you want, what kind of marriage can there be without God, without the Church?.. Read the Gospel, try to pray, the priest admonished.
My patient left, feeling guilty and hopeless. Despite what seemed to him to be a cold, formal tone, he recalls that he felt some kind of truth behind the priest’s words, but not a shadow of sympathy.
In his mental turmoil, he returned to work again and, unexpectedly for himself, told his colleague about everything, although he was not particularly close to him. He got down to business with enthusiasm: “Yes, they’re all like that, she’s not worth you, you take revenge on her, well, if you want, I’ll introduce you to such a guy...” - and so on in the same spirit. He poured out a whole range of typical vulgarities on my patient, and he, understanding the value of them, nevertheless felt some mental relief.
We see how opposite these two consolations are. In the first there was no spiritual sympathy, mercy, but there was spiritual truth; in the second there was a lively emotional response, but there was no truth. Do not these polarities reveal the presence in such cases of a fundamentally irremovable contradiction between the spiritual and the spiritual? One cannot do without the medicine of spiritual reproof, but it is too bitter and is rejected and not accepted by the spiritual organism, while a sweet spiritual pill distracts from the pain for a minute, but gives false peace. Can “mercy and truth” ever meet in consolation (Ps. 84:11)?
In a famous episode from The Brothers Karamazov, a young woman comes to Elder Zosima, grieving for her deceased three-year-old “son.” She has been visiting monasteries for three months now: her house is empty, there is no point in returning there. First, the elder tries to console her with a story about the ancient zero-faced Saint, who said to the same grieving mother, doesn’t she know that dead babies are immediately granted the rank of angel, and therefore they should rejoice and not cry.
The woman looked down and sighed: “In this way Nikitushka consoled me, word for word...” What happened? Why did spiritual medicine not work on the soul? Why didn't she hear any consolation in these words? Yes, because the soul itself was not heard, the very element of experiences, mental anguish rejected as ungodly, spiritually illegitimate - one should, they say, rejoice, not cry. And the elder gives up trying to tear her gaze away from grief and transfer it to heaven, to where “the baby will probably now stand before the throne of the Lord, and rejoice and have fun,” because he felt that such a spiritual uplift is not now available to the mother’s heart. And instead of lifting her soul up, tearing her away from grief, the elder, on the contrary, compassionately descends into the depths of inconsolable grief, accepting inconsolability as a true reality: “And do not be consoled, and you do not need to be consoled, do not be consoled and cry,” says the elder . This cannot be said from the outside, from the outside. To say so, you need to let this experience into your soul in all its hopelessness, hopelessness and hopelessness. And only after such a descent into hell of a suffering soul does it become possible there, inside this darkness, to light the lamp of spiritual consolation: “Cry,” says the elder, “only every time you cry, remember unswervingly that your son is the only one from the angels of God, from there He looks at you and sees you and rejoices at your tears and points them out to the Lord God. And you will continue to experience this maternal cry for a long time, but in the end it will turn into quiet joy for you...”
Let's take a closer look at this skillful spiritual psychotherapy. The soul is allowed to cry and inconsolability is almost prescribed (“don’t be consoled and cry”), but a small spiritual prayer cutting is grafted onto this spiritual tree of suffering (“every time you cry, remember that my son... is one of the angels... "), so that the juices of experience and the energy of prayer are combined in a single bloodstream of the spiritual organism. But that’s not all: if I, a grieving mother, remain in my inconsolability and from it in the distant future see the baby angel, then the painful, unfulfillable desire to meet him here will constantly be revived (“If only I could hear him walking around the room with his legs he will walk just once, if only he could walk with his legs knock-knock, and so often, often..."). Therefore, the spiritual consolation of the elder gives the grieving a completely different, opposite perspective, characteristic of reverent prayerful standing before God, when it is not I who peer into Him, but, on the contrary, I stand before His gaze in spiritual openness. How does Elder Zosima do this? “Your son looks at you from there and rejoices at your tears, and points them out to the Lord God.” How simple and what a radical revolution: tears had just been an expression of my grief, and now they became the object of his touched admiration, a reason for the joy of the baby angel. The soul is given the opportunity to look at itself from there, at least for a minute, and in this reverse perspective to touch spiritual joy. It is one thing to have spiritual joy, which is normatively prescribed for my soul instead of tears; Another thing is the spiritual joy of him, his beloved, about my tears, a joy in which I also become involved, and precisely through my tears. The prayer perspective created for the experience of grief does not try to supplant the spiritual with the spiritual, but to expand the spiritual, not to abolish grief, but to give “space in sorrow,” space in which one can breathe.
And lastly: the elder does not think that with one single act of consolation the soul is healed. He treats with reverent respect the reality of the spiritual process of experiencing: “And for a long time you will still have this maternal cry.” This is the attitude of a patient, caring gardener who knows that the tree takes time to bear fruit.
Let us summarize the main features of this spiritual consolation, highlighting several phases in it.
The “mental empathy” phase. Mental experience is accepted unconditionally and without judgment in its empirical reality as genuine and having the right to exist. It is accepted not from the outside, but as if from within, with emotional sympathy, condolences, and compassion.
The “spiritual inoculation” phase. Spiritual pictures, images, prayer instructions do not remain hanging in the air, but are grafted directly onto the body of experience (“every time you cry, remember...”).
"Ascension" phase. The elder erects a spiritual vertical, gives the opportunity not only to look at the spiritual from the soul, but also the possibility of a reverse perspective - a look at experience, at tears from there. And this is how the joy available in this spiritual vertical is shown.
The "path" phase. The matter is not limited to the vertical; consolation also took care of the horizontal path of the earthly path. It would be unrealistic to count on a one-time action in the matter of spiritual healing. The elder prepares the grieving woman for the long journey of maternal crying and draws its spiritual outcome - “quiet joy.”
The overall image of this spiritual psychotherapy is a prayer ladder of experience. Senile consolation does not directly teach prayer here, but it builds a spiritual ladder, the bottom rung of which is sorrow and inconsolability, and the top step is spiritual joy. Spiritual experience is not rejected or even truncated, it is carefully accepted without reserve, but is introduced into the spiritual vertical as its element, so that the very natural movement of experience begins to perform spiritual transformative work.
If we now look back at the examples given earlier, we see three types of consolation.
One, let’s call it conventionally “spiritually indifferent,” is consolation without consolation, there is no human warmth in it. It bypasses human experience. His everyday prototype: “Bruised your knee? It's my own fault."
The second is “spiritually seductive” consolation. It has a spiritual response, it can warm you up for a short time, but it acts by replacing one passion with another (the pain of jealousy - the passion of revenge, for example). And there is no spiritual truth in him, nor, if you think about it, real compassion. It also ignores human experience. His common slogan is: “Come on, don’t worry.”
Finally, the third - “spiritually compassionate” consolation - compassionately plunges into the waters of the emotional experience of the mourner, then erects a spiritual ladder, by moving along which human experience can be transformed into prayer and thereby transformed.
This consolation deserves the name spiritual psychotherapy. If the formula of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is “I must take the place of It,” then the formula of spiritual psychotherapy is: “Prayer must take the place of experience.” Not instead of experience, but in the place of experience, the lamp of prayer should be lit, it should burn along with experience. The experience itself is melted and reborn into prayer, just as oil, rising through a wick, becomes fire.
In connection with this conclusion, it is necessary to specifically consider the relationship between experience and prayer.
Experience and Prayer
The practice of spiritual care creates a special approach to the topic of emotions and experiences, which is most important for Christian anthropology and psychology. The attitude towards this topic has traditionally developed under the dominant influence of the ascetic discourse of the fight against passions. Counseling and ascetic discourse, while coinciding in the sphere of ultimate goals, differ significantly in methods and style. In particular, in the ascetic context, the metaphors of war and battle often dominate, and in the counseling context, the metaphors of medicine dominate.
How a doctor looks at illness not only as an evil, but also as an attempt healthy strength the body cope with harmful effects, so the practice of Christian counseling must explore the processes of human experience both in their negative tendencies of transformation into passions and in their positive tendencies of spiritual growth.
Let us outline some issues for studying experience from this angle, in the paradigm of counseling.
(a) First, there is the question of those characteristics of the process of experience that make possible its beneficial connection with prayer.
(b) The second question is about the types of connection between experience and prayer.
(c) The third is about the influence of prayer on experience.
Some features of the experiencing process that are important for the discourse of counseling
Psychological analysis of experience identifies three structural elements in it (experienced circumstances, process of experiencing, personality) and three planes of flow (plane of expression, plane of feeling and plane of comprehension).
Let us dwell on two essential characteristics of experience related to the plane of expression. It is about the openness of the experience and its addressed.
Openness of experience. The dynamics of experience are considered by modern secular psychotherapy most often in projection on the “containment - expression” axis. At the same time, psychotherapists, as a rule, treat the suppression of feelings with psychohygienic suspicion as a relic of repressive Victorian morality and therefore stimulate expressions of feelings in every possible way. Expression is not always, but too often, reduced to the idea of affective release. These could be primitive punches to rubber dolls depicting bosses at the entrance of a Japanese factory; these can be sophisticated ways of working with the imagination, when an offended patient (I give an example from one article) is asked to vent her accumulated anger by making an imaginary “Margarita’s flight” over Moscow to her rival’s windows, which, of course, must be broken with pleasure. This does not change the essence of the matter, because it is not in the method, but in the latent anthropology and axiology: if you hold back, you will damage your health, if you really break glass, you will damage your social status. What to do? There is an ideal solution - to react without limiting yourself in anything, but not in social behavior, but in the soul, in the imagination. Bodily health is a value, social status- value, and the soul - the soul will endure everything. Anthropology, which is ignorant of the idea of transformation, must be content with the idea of the canalization of affects. The saddest thing is that this is not just an idea among ideas, but a formed and widespread culture of mental life.
Prayer makes it possible to break out of the false dilemma of “repression - reaction”, creating an additional dimension of height and depth of experience. In this dimension, both gracious restraint (which does not at all coincide with repression, creating not an unconscious, but an intimate experience) and a gracious, transformative expression of experience are possible. For an experience to be fully expressed in prayer, a person must dare to open it and be able to open it. “To be able to” means to solve a problem that is poetic in meaning: to try to sincere words express the truth of your heart.
“To dare” means to solve the problem of “standing”: to find enough courage and trust in yourself to put your feelings before God without embellishment and justification, as they are. Openness to your experience in prayer begins with the art and courage to be, trust and hope, and is crowned with the courage and art of change.
Addressability of the experience. Observations in the field of child psychology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy convincingly show that every human experience has an immanent addressee. Let us recall the classic observation of K. Chukovsky:
Well, Nyura, that’s enough, don’t cry!
- I’m not paying to you, but to Aunt Sima.
Experience can get lost, mix up the address, and this leads to painful distortions of both the feelings themselves and human relationships. It is enough to recall the phenomena of transference in psychotherapy or exalted “peace-bearing” in parish life.
The process of experiencing, its nature and genre significantly depend on who the experience is addressed to and whether the address itself is explicit or hidden, definite or indefinite.
A first-grader has broken his knee and is in great pain, but in the presence of a compassionate grandmother he will experience this pain completely differently than in the presence of his older brother, who came on leave from the army.
Prayerfully addressing a feeling immediately begins to change the process of experiencing it. Out of loneliness and abandonment, a person says “Father...” and adds “our...” - words that cancel loneliness and abandonment; out of defenselessness, he cries out to “my Queen”, out of hopelessness - “my hope, Mother of God,” and these prayer appeals themselves begin healing work on a psychological level. At the peak of this prayerful expression of the experience, if a person manages to fully address the experience to God or the saints, a metamorphosis occurs with the experience, changing its entire internal logic: the “logic of satisfaction” is replaced by the “logic of replenishment in being.”
According to the “logic of satisfaction,” events could develop like this: I lost something important in my life, I tried on my own to regain what I had lost, I became convinced that this was impossible, I tried to somehow survive the situation, but I had to come to terms with the fact that this is also impossible, that I myself could not do anything, and then I began to cry out in prayer for help in the hopeless hope that by some miracle everything would work out and I would receive consolation and become myself again, live my own life, for without what I had lost I am not myself and my life is not life. I can't think of anything else. And suddenly... Everything changes. How could I, ready for death, know that right there, just on the other side of my desperate prayer cry, such a gracious, such a life-giving breath would breathe on me that in an instant the very deep logic of my feelings and thoughts would change, moreover, the very the basis of my existence. It is already clearly perceptible that only here, only with this breath, do I, in fact, exist in in the truest sense words, only in it and with it do I find the fullness of being, the fullness of life and the fullness of meaning. And then it begins to be revealed that the danger from which I fled and asked for refuge, the thirst in which I asked for water, the resentment in which I asked for justice, the quarrel in which I asked for peace, that all this is both water and refuge, both justice and peace, with all their irrevocable importance, are only harbingers, only reasons, only heralds of the Meeting. All this will be given to me in abundance, but these are all partial manifestations of the main thing that awaits me - replenishment in being.
This replenishment in being is the main transformation of experience when addressed in prayer.
Types of connection between experience and prayer
Both experience and prayer are complex activities that can be in various relationships with each other. Let us try to outline some types of combinations between experience and prayer.
"Snow drift." The heroine of one feature film, a strong village woman, kneels in the evening before icons and fervently prays for adult daughter: “Look - some good men have moved away, and some have gotten married, only drunkards remain. And why should she disappear alone now? This is not good, it’s wrong,” she admonishes God. The prayer is interrupted by an old woman sleeping on the stove. She pulls back the chintz curtain and reprimands her daughter: “Why are you talking to God as to a foreman?! You pray, you must pray!” The prayer book comes to its senses, makes the sign of the cross and begins to read “It is worthy to eat...” in the usual patter, as if pushing aside her “ungodly” excitement.
The prayer that caused the old woman’s reproach can be conditionally called “snow drift,” since the combination of experience and prayer here is such that the prayer seems to spread along the ground. Although this prayer captivates the viewer with its spontaneity, a living, ardent feeling of concern for the unfortunate fate of a loved one, in this case the experience enslaves the prayer, subordinating it to its own logic, rhythm and tasks. The old woman, who cut short her daughter’s prayer, could not appreciate the precious thing that was in her - the personal, direct nature of the relationship with God, but there was some truth in the mother’s remark. This combination of prayer and experience leads to the fact that prayer looks too much at one’s feet and, in the end, can be reduced down to speech or even motor automatisms, to fleeting inclusions in ordinary experience (sighs “Oh Lord!”, raising the eyes up and etc.), which do not significantly change anything in the process of experiencing.
Although in this case one cannot completely deny the significance of such a reduced prayer, for even such an unconscious, involuntary and wingless prayer still remains a calling on God and therefore, in the order of spiritual objectivity, can significantly influence experience and life.
"Parallel". After the old woman’s remark, the combination of prayer and experience takes on a form that can be called a “parallel.” Your base, everyday, sinful life and the experiences associated with it are one thing, and holy prayer is quite another. She must be clean from all these ordinary, everyday little things, from everything spiritual, earthly and therefore dirty. This attitude towards prayer cannot be denied piety and a kind of humility and asceticism. But such a prayer, like the priest from the parable of the Good Samaritan, will try to pass by the wounded, bad-looking life, fearing to get dirty and desecrated itself, and in its Pharisaic purity it constantly betrays life, abandons it, leaves it to the mercy of fate.
However, one cannot completely condemn such a prayer, because in it there is, albeit a spiritually false, but still an impulse towards God, towards purity, towards righteousness, towards piety, and such prayer can sometimes bear fruit. But its danger is great, for, while calming the conscience with piety, it leaves the experience helpless and pushes it to be ashamed of itself, of the very fact of its existence, to go out of sight, hide in the unconscious, or manifest itself either in illness or disease. in drunkenness, then in unexpected outbursts of passion.
Prayer that arises during an experience can enter into a tense confrontation with the experience, in which prayer and experience will fight each other for the right to determine the entire mental process. They will argue about how to understand the meaning of the situation, what name to call it, open or close their souls to others, what to hope for, what to desire, etc. Despite the drama of such relationships and their danger, and maybe because of this drama , in such a combination of experience and prayer there are many fruitful spiritual possibilities - the possibilities of what is truly living, sincere human feeling, without spilling a single drop of spiritual energy, will be transformed, internally melted into a spiritual movement, just as the furious persecutor Saul was transformed into a fiery Apostle.
Much more dangerous in this sense is the conflict between experience and prayer, which resembles a protracted quarrel, when they turned away from each other, a painful, tense silence reigned between them, in the atmosphere of which both experience and prayer froze and petrified. Then you need to try to “unfreeze” the situation, even at the cost of aggravating it.
Several years ago, a man walked into my psychotherapy office with a piece of plastic attached to his nose. He was once in love, the love turned out to be unrequited, he connected this with his appearance, had plastic surgery, the operation was unsuccessful, it had to be repeated, then again and again, he spent all his money and as a result was left without a nose at all, without lover, no money, no job and no friends. The only connection with the world that was not severed was her sister, who, however, could barely bear it. At her insistence, he came; he did not have any personal request for psychotherapy. It was not even a lack of request, but a prepared protest against any attempts to help and support.
“Why did so many misfortunes befall me,” he began defiantly. “Just don’t try to calm me down,” he winced and interrupted my sigh. - I read many spiritual books, re-read the entire Bible several times. They say that God does not give trials greater than a person can bear. But he gave it to me. That means He doesn't exist. And if there is, He is not merciful. He gives tests beyond his strength. I am not a hero, not an apostle, not a saint. I am a weak and sick person. Why am I being subjected to one misfortune after another? It's merciless and unfair.
He fell silent. I didn't know what to do. At that moment I understood how Job's friends felt. With hopelessness and life's dead ends a psychotherapist often has to deal with this - that’s the profession. But usually a person comes ready to get help and change something, although often without believing that this is possible. My patient took a position of militant inconsolability. He didn't come for help, he came to win. He came to defend his human dignity in order to once again prove that a person had not yet been born who could console him. Meanwhile, he was silent and waited for an answer.
I didn't have an answer. Moreover, I clearly felt that any answer I gave would be a lie. But why? And then I understood. His feelings, his complaint, his protest were not internally addressed to me as a psychotherapist. He brought his challenge to God here. These feelings were addressed to Him, but the soul turned away from Him, as the source of offense, in suffering. If so, then there was no way I could answer on my own, I couldn’t stand between him and God. It was necessary to step into the shadows and try to simply “turn the dial” so that his painful experience could return to its real addressee and real genre - a prayerful cry to God. I said:
I realized that more troubles and torments befell you than you can bear. This is unbearable. But if someone starts to feel sorry for you, it only makes you angry. You began to look for the answer in Scripture and did not find it. Now you seem to stand before God and challenge Him: “You have given me tests beyond my strength. It's merciless. This makes me doubt in my soul that You exist. My faith was shaken. I'm not a hero, You see, I'm not a hero. I have no more strength". This is what I thought you were telling Him.
Yes, - said Nikolai. And the belligerence was no longer in his voice. It was as if he didn't have anything to prove anymore. - Yes. And He is silent. And life goes by. I'm scared.
These words were already addressed to me. They had the same pain, the same loneliness and the same abandonment, but there was also something new - permission to empathize. Before he heard his own prayer from someone else's lips, he did not consider it a prayer, and his suffering was petrified in a warlike pose, not allowing either man or God to approach him. Now it seems to have started to thaw. I thought, “Blessed are those who mourn,” but I was afraid to say it out loud.
"Organism". The last type of relationship between prayer and experience can be called an “organism.” Experience can develop into prayer and organically unite with it; in such a spiritual-spiritual organism, a remelting takes place, a transformation of the mental into the spiritual, without going into spirituality, with the enlightenment of the very fabric of mental life or at least its individual cells.
Experience is mediated by prayer, and like any means, prayer transforms the form and structure of the process of experience from the inside. Experience in this case becomes a “cultural” process, that is, a process cultivated and grown by prayer. The entire experience of prayer accumulated by the cult enters into the matter of spiritual life and reveals in it itself, and does not introduce from the outside, the sacrament of the Kingdom (“The Kingdom of God is within you” - Luke 17:21). But not only the combination of the spontaneously natural and the “cultural” is carried out in such an organism of experience-prayer, but also the connection of the individual, personal and communal. Experience in prayer ceases to be my private, solitary affair, but becomes a collective act, having not only local subjective, but ultimately cosmic significance.
The influence of prayer on experience
The last question asked above is what is the effect of prayer on experience?
These influences are varied, but their essence can be expressed by the category of sublimation. Here we understand sublimation not in the Freudian meaning of the term, not as a process of expressing an impulse prohibited by censorship in culturally, socially and consciously acceptable forms. With this understanding, sublimation is only a method of sophisticated deception and self-deception, when the lower, illegal is nevertheless dragged into the legal social space under the cover of magnificent vestments, lipstick, makeup and perfume. Sublimation in exact value The term is sublimation, i.e. the separation of the higher from the lower. Prayer precisely does this work of sublimation of experience, separating inside the true from the false, the higher from the lower, and, maintaining this distinction, exposes the soul to the rays of grace, hoping that not a single cell of being, not a single sprout of meaning, not a single movement souls, no matter how dirty or unrighteous they may seem to the Pharisee and lawyer, will not be abandoned, discarded, truncated, but will be grown into themselves by the power of grace, will realize their original plan for themselves, and will be embodied in perfection. Sublimation of experience is not a sophisticated smuggling of the lower, but the creation of conditions for discerning in it the truth, the truth, the highest and gradual transformation of it.
* * *
This collection is devoted to the teaching of the Church about man. It seems that one of the most important needs of church life is a rethinking of the entire field of Christian counseling, with all its traditional and newly emerging forms.
For Christian anthropology, counseling is not only a topic, but also an approach, a point of view, a paradigm of thought. It is one thing to comprehend from the standpoint of Orthodox anthropology, for example, the sin of drunkenness, and quite another thing to understand the church forms and methods of helping to overcome this sin that are now emerging. It is one thing to have an anthropological understanding of, for example, the sacrament of marriage, and quite another thing to have an anthropological understanding of the experience of pastoral counseling and spiritual care for complex, conflict-ridden, so-called dysfunctional families. The very complex, dramatic practice of Christian counseling should be understood not only as something applied, merely implementing theological teaching in the practice of church life, but as a productive method of Christian anthropological knowledge, relating, according to the formulation of S. S. Khoruzhy, to the “participatory organon.” The fruit of this method may be the construction not of an abstract academic concept, but of “participatory Orthodox anthropology.”
In such an anthropology, counseling is in no way separated from the secret performance, from the liturgical life. On the contrary, it will fully reveal the anthropological and spiritual dimension of the church sacraments.
Analyzing the relationship between affect and cult using the example of the burial rite, Father Pavel Florensky wrote: “The purpose of the cult is precisely to transform natural sobbing, natural cry... natural crying and regret into a sacred song, into sacred word, in a sacred gesture. Do not prohibit natural movements, do not restrict them, do not curtail wealth inner life, but on the contrary - to affirm this wealth in its fullness, consolidate, cultivate.
The random is taken for granted by the cult, the subjective is clarified into the objective. The cult transforms the natural into the ideal. One could try to suppress the affect. But... - he continues, - entering into a struggle with affects means one of two things: if it is unsuccessful, it will poison humanity with “passions driven inside,” but if it is successful, it will emasculate and kill humanity, depriving it of vitality, strength and, finally, life itself. .
The cult operates differently; he approves everything human nature, with all the affects; he brings every affect to its greatest possible scope - opening up for it an endless scope of outlet; he leads him to a beneficial crisis, purifying and thereby τρα?ματα τ?ς ψυχ?ς [ mental wounds]. It not only allows the affect to come out completely, but also requires the greatest of its tension, draws it out, aggravates it, as if prompting, inciting it to affect. And, giving him full recognition, affirming the passion in his truth, the cult transforms him...
Whether anger, rage, boredom... - the cult takes on everything and transforms everything and satisfies everything to the end: in the cult we drink to the dregs the very essence of our excitement, we are completely satisfied, without the slightest remaining unsatisfied desire - for the cult always gives more than we ask, and even more than we can want..."
Moscow City Psychological and Pedagogical University, professor, President of the Association of Understanding Psychotherapy.Encyclopedic YouTube
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Understanding psychotherapy, experience and empathy. Vasilyuk F. E.
Christmas readings 2011 (Part 1)
Subtitles
Biography
1981 – 1987 - have worked clinical psychologist in a psychiatric hospital (Strogonovka village in Crimea).
1986 – 1988 – participated in the creation of one of the country’s first specialized socio-psychological centers, and since 1988 – in the creation of the Institute of Humanity of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
1990 – organized the Center for Psychology and Psychotherapy.
Scientific activity
In the field of methodology of psychological science F.E. Vasilyuk considers schism (splitting) into academic and psychotechnical (practical) psychology. He introduced and developed the concept of “psychological practice” in comparison with the concept of “practical psychology”. Practical psychology– in contrast to psychological practice (psychotherapy, psychological counseling) – this is the participation of a psychologist in other social practices, within other departmental frameworks (in the fields of medicine, education, etc.).
F.E. Vasilyuk developed theoretical ideas about experience as an activity. He developed the concepts and typology of “life worlds”, crisis situations, as well as a typology of experiencing crises depending on a person’s “life world”. Based on a single set of theoretical and practical developments, he created his own psychotechnical system - understanding psychotherapy(Russian Humanitarian Foundation grant "Understanding psychotherapy as a psychotechnical system"). Also F.E. Vasilyuk is the author of original practical methods of psychotherapy - “director’s presentation of a symptom”, “psychotechnics of choice”.
In the study “Stratigraphy of Consciousness and Functional-Dynamic Modeling of Consciousness Processes” (RFBR grant, 2010) F.E. Vasilyuk proposed his structure levels of consciousness functioning: levels of reflection, awareness, direct experience and the unconscious. To analyze the dynamic aspects of the image, he introduced the concept consciousness strategy. He also created a classification of consciousness strategies based on the model psychosemiotic tetrahedron .
Teaching activities
F.E. Vasilyuk has developed and taught the following academic disciplines:
- Basics of psychological counseling and psychotherapy,
- Understanding psychotherapy,
- Psychology of consciousness and experience,
- Psychotechnics of life worlds,
- Psychotechnics of experience,
- Psychotherapeutic didactics and supervision (for graduate students)
Publishing activities
Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Consultative Psychology and Psychotherapy” (until 2009 inclusive - “Moscow Psychotherapeutic Journal”)
It must be said that such an orientation in the study of experience is not something new for the activity approach in psychology: 40 years ago, under the direct influence of the ideas of L. S. Vygotsky, A. N. Leontiev and A. R. Luria set the task of “considering complex human experiences as a product of historical development..."
Indeed, in every human experience it is not difficult to detect its cultural and historical mediation. Why, say, in the example mentioned more than once about the prisoners of the Shlisselburg fortress, the situation of forced physical labor turned out to be unbearable for them and became psychologically acceptable only as a result of an experience that internally restructured the motivation of this alienated, forced activity so that, while remaining the same in its operational composition , has it transformed into a psychologically completely different activity - free and voluntary activity? That is, why is it that the free form of activity is in this case psychologically more acceptable and why does the experience tend to portray any other form of activity as (or transform into) free? One must think that for an ancient slave, for example, such a situation would not require any experience at all, but not because, of course, he was simply accustomed to obeying, for this very fact of habit requires its own explanation. A slave could come to terms with his situation in life (even if he was born free and only then became a slave), because in his mind there were operating in his mind “schematisms” that grew up on the basis of the slave-owning formation, and at the same time possessing immediate phenomenological evidence for him, “schematisms,” according to by which a slave was “only an inanimate thing (in Roman law that is what a slave is called - res, “thing”) or, at most, a domestic animal.” It is extremely important for us that we are talking not only about the fact that the slave-owning type of society objectively and “necessarily requires the presence of a slave, that is, a person understood and acting as a thing” [ibid., p. 53], but also about the absence “in man himself the consciousness that he is a man and not a thing” [ibid.], about the absence in antiquity of “experience itself human personality" [ibid., p. 52].
And completely different schematisms determine the consciousness and self-awareness of a person of modern European culture. In the experiences of the revolutionaries, prisoners of the Shlisselburg fortress, perhaps the central of these schematisms, which can be conditionally called “Personality,” appeared. In the field of action of this schematism, the highest value is given to such characteristics of human life as consciousness, volition, initiative, responsibility, etc., in a word, freedom. To the extent of a person’s real psychological involvement in a given cultural institution, the listed characteristics of activity are actually intense and vital requirements for him, and the experience, if possible, strives to rebuild or reformulate and rethink the situation so that it meets them. In other words, a certain meaningful orientation of the process of experiencing is by no means inherent in the human psyche in general. A primitive man, for example, would not think of whether he was personally responsible for a failure in a hunt or not. The blame is placed on witchcraft, damage, and bad influence, from which he defends himself with magical procedures, thereby experiencing this situation completely differently than a modern European would experience it.
However, establishing the historicity of the processes of experience is half the battle. The actual psychological formulation of the problem is to apply to the analysis of experience general scheme socio-historical determination of the psyche, already tested by L. S. Vygotsky and his students on a variety of psychological material, namely, to understand experience as a process mediated by “psychological tools”, which are artificial, social in nature formations [ibid., p.224 ], mastered and internalized by the subject in the course of communication with other people.
Implementation of cultural historical approach The study of experience involves the analysis of three interrelated questions: what are the specific cultural means of experience? What are the features of the process of their development? and, finally, what is the nature of the participation of other people in this development and in the individual’s experience?
Neither the author’s erudition nor the scope of this work allows us to give comprehensive answers to these questions. Their detailed study is the subject of special research. Now, outlining the prospects for these studies, we see our task as first, based on the general ideas of the cultural-historical approach, to put forward at least the most schematic ideas that could serve as primary indicative hypotheses study of this problem, and then illustrate these ideas with data from our special analysis of a specific case of experience, in which the cultural and historical mediation of this process manifested itself especially clearly.
What are specific cultural means of experiencing? It is logical to assume that they should in one way or another concentrate the historically accumulated experience of experiencing typical life situations, that, relating to only one type of these situations, each of them should have sufficient substantive certainty and at the same time, being potentially applicable to the life of any individual, i.e. generally valid, it should be very formal. Further, in accordance with general ideas cultural-historical approach, in the sign formations that mediate the mental process (including experience), the individual finds not just a “tool” or means that quantitatively increases his capabilities, but also a formative structure, the implementation of which qualitatively reconstructs the entire process.
All these characteristics are met by well-known (but, however, poorly known, if we keep in mind the distance between the known and the known, which Hegel spoke about) to the majority humanities special meaningful schemes, the idea of which has existed, it seems, since philosophy has existed. (63)
By connecting to one or another cultural “schematism of consciousness” (to use the term of famous Soviet philosophers), individual consciousness begins to obey its special “formative laws”. These schematisms can serve as a form of a person’s comprehension and rethinking of the events and circumstances of his life, and therefore, a culturally specified form of individual experience.
As for the question of mastering schematisms, this process differs sharply from the process of intellectual assimilation. Although schematism is, from a certain point of view, a system of meanings, it cannot be learned as a system scientific knowledge, for schematism is always symbolically rich and, like any symbol, it is characterized by “semantic depth, a semantic perspective that requires difficult entry into oneself,” and entry not only with the mind, but with the whole life. You can “enter” schematism only by achieving a certain state consciousness corresponding to the structure of this schematism. (64)
The analysis of a specific case of experience given below allows us to put forward the assumption that the work of experience can be carried out by “entering” schematism. The same analysis shows that “entering” schematism is not a one-act process, but consisting of many stages. Moreover, the first “entries” are random and fleeting in nature; consciousness seems to fall into schematism due to the fact that certain actions of the subject and life situations in which he finds himself objectively tune his consciousness in tune with schematism. But in order to firmly “enter” schematism and thereby survive the crisis, it is necessary not just an appropriate attunement of consciousness, but its deep restructuring.
This complex operation on one’s personality cannot be performed individually. The Other is absolutely necessary in her. Moreover, apparently, not every Other, but only a person, whose image is for the experiencer a living embodiment of the worldview corresponding to the schematism into which he has to “enter.” The role of the Other in experience is especially clearly visible from a historical perspective. If a person belonging to modern urban culture, experiencing, for example, the death of a loved one, often strives for solitude and sometimes perceives collective acts of funeral and commemoration of the deceased simply as a tribute to tradition, a custom that has absolutely nothing to do with his intimate experience of loss, then in cultures an essential aspect of the reproduction of which is “the constant functioning and transmission of ritual-mythological practice, the performance of funeral rites and, therefore, connection to the corresponding symbolisms and is, strictly speaking, the very act of experiencing the experience (cf.: 101, p. 135). All important , turning points, turning points in human life have always gravitated towards their collective acceptance and experience.From this point of view, a wide field of activity opens up for the researcher of the psychology of experience in psychological study rituals associated with birth, death, initiation, wedding, etc.
It must be emphasized that all these provisions are of a completely preliminary nature.
By now starting to analyze a specific case of experience, namely Rodion Raskolnikov’s experience of his crime, we, along with the main goal - to illustrate and concretize these provisions - also hope to illustrate whole line other provisions put forward in previous parts of the work. But first, one caveat must be made due to the fact that the object of our analysis is not a real person, but literary character. What evidence does the data from such an analysis have? Can he, in principle, count on identifying real psychological patterns, for example, due to the realism of the image? Is it possible to hope that the writer, without going beyond the limits of psychological authenticity in depicting actions and experiences, does not distort psychological laws anywhere, i.e., that everything he described is in principle possible and as a psychological reality? By examining the psychological patterns of characters' behavior, are we engaged in the reconstruction of reality or just the reconstruction of the artist's hidden concept, his opinion about this reality? (Although is this “just” so little, especially when it comes to Dostoevsky?) Or maybe even try to study psychology real people by analyzing the products of poetic fiction is it as pointless as studying the hydrology of the sea from the canvases of marine painters?
We leave all these questions open and, at our own peril and risk, undertake a study of Raskolnikov’s experience as if we were dealing with real person, a certain period of whose life was faithfully described by the writer.
It is quite clear that it is necessary to begin the study by understanding the origins and ways of the emergence of the psychological situation of “impossibility” that created the need for this experience.
“The feeling of isolation and disconnection from humanity,” which grew in Raskolnikov long before the crime, was the main internal root of his crime and at the same time the general life problem facing him. On the first pages of “Crime and Punishment” we find the already far advanced process of “isolation of the hero, breaking all the ties of communication that united him with other people: Raskolnikov “fled from all society”, he developed a “habit of monologues”, “with his former comrades now he didn’t like to meet at all.” Although he occasionally still feels “some kind of thirst for people,” however, as soon as it comes to real contact, Raskolnikov experiences “an unpleasant and irritable feeling of disgust for any stranger’s face that touched or only wanted to touch his personality."
The conflict between the tendency to “be outside” people and the opposing, albeit very weakened, tendency to “be with” them resulted in a compromise attitude of “being above people,” which precisely corresponded to the balance of forces of these aspirations: after all, although “above” is partly and “together with,” but still to a much greater extent “outside.” This compromise found its direct psychological expression in Raskolnikov’s heightened pride, and its meaningful ideological embodiment in his “theory” of two categories of people. This was the psychological basis on which the idea of a crime could be “accepted”: pride promised to ensure the psychological endurance of the crime, the “theory” - its ethical justification, and the implementation of the crime, in turn, looked like proof of the correctness of the “theory” and certification of a superhuman “right” its author, his affiliation with highest level of people. And already on another, more grounded plane, the crime seemed to resolve both external, material difficulties and the internal problems associated with them, first of all, the reluctance to accept the sacrifice of Dunechka, who agreed for the sake of her brother to marry Luzhin.
Leaving aside detailed analysis the psychological transition of an “idea” into a “deed” (phases of this transition: from an abstract “theory” to a “dream”, then to a concretely planned “enterprise”, then to a “test” and, finally, to the actual commission of a crime), we only note that this process was accompanied by a painful moral struggle of the hero with his “damned dream.” The closer she came to the “case”, the final the hero’s decision became, “the uglier and more absurd it immediately became in his eyes”, the stronger, therefore, became the internal resistance to the “idea” on the part of conscience, just as more and more The resistance of the spring increases as it is compressed. This internal dispute was never fundamentally resolved by consciousness in favor of the crime (it is enough to remember in what state of confusion and loss of will Raskolnikov was before the murder and especially on the way to the house of the old pawnbroker to understand that it was not the result of a conscious and arbitrary decision ), and even the crime itself not only did not resolve it, but with the brute force of the accomplished fact only strengthened in his soul this spring of moral struggle, compressed to the point of failure, stopping its fluctuations in the most unbearable state of tension.
If before the crime Raskolnikov was forced to build a life and communicate, “sick” with the idea of the crime, the opinion about it and its possible ethical justification and psychological tolerance, now he was burdened by the fact of the murder committed. From the content of consciousness, the implementation of which could be refused and with which one could argue, it has grown into the content of being, with which it is no longer possible to argue and cannot be removed from life. But it is also impossible to accept it into life, as the first psychological reactions to this fact showed. Raskolnikov’s “theory,” which claimed to ensure his acceptance, to give meaning to the crime, immediately revealed its complete psychological failure. This “theory,” which substantiated the idea of crime, being abstracted from the essential layers of the personality of its author and performer, turned out to be unequal to its “practice”: it was broken through by a real act that embodied the idea and thereby sensually confronted it with everything complex composition the personality of the hero and this collision debunked (not at the level of rational consciousness, but at the level of “nature”, in the words of Porfiry Petrovich) the claims of the theory, more precisely, the “Napoleonic” ideal arising from it, to the role of an internally organizing and “holistic” principle of the personality. And since the integrity of the personality is not, generally speaking, a naturally given unity, but is a given unity, actively created by the person himself, the loss of the unifying principle opens access to the processes of decay and disintegration of the personality and its life.
Raskolnikov felt "all over himself terrible mess". The temporary continuity of consciousness is broken: he realized that he cannot "think about the same things now as before, and be interested in the same old topics that he was interested in... so recently... In some depth, below , somewhere barely visible under his feet, it now seemed to him all this former past, and former tasks, and former themes, and former impressions... and he himself, and everything, everything..." Communication with himself, with people, with the world: “It was as if he had cut himself off from everyone and everything with scissors...” (65)
From this moment the hero's experience begins. In the absence of new value system, on the basis of which it would be possible to rebuild the personality as a whole and thereby resolve internal conflicts that are insoluble in the existing life world, consciousness, trying to prevent the final destruction of the personality, is forced to resort to defense mechanisms. However psychological protection although it strives to achieve some unity, but, submitting, as we already know, to an “infantile” attitude, it tries to fight against complexity not by overcoming and resolving it, but by its illusory simplification and elimination. Insensitive to the whole psychological situation; it acts by inflexible means, the negative consequences of which outweigh it positive effects. Specifically, in the case of Raskolnikov, attempts to defensively experience the main conflict not only do not resolve it positively, but, drawing more and more new relationships into the zone of its action, give rise to a whole network of derivative conflicts, ultimately infecting the entire mental organism.
Let us briefly trace the progress of the formation of this network. Before the crime, the central conflict - between the idea of crime and conscience - was constantly pulsating in the consciousness, it was an incessant internal struggle, which was carried out by all means of consciousness - rational, unconscious (Raskolnikov’s first dream), emotional. The emotional dynamics of this conflict were expressed in the hero’s growing sense of disgust for the “idea” and for himself as its bearer as more and more final decisions were made, i.e., as the “idea” approached the “deed,” and in the emergence of a feeling of relief over as she moves away from the “case”, renouncing the “damned dream”. When the crime was committed, the feeling of self-loathing reached such threatening proportions, it became so unbearable that it became necessary to get rid of it or at least somehow transform it. Consciousness chooses the path of protective projection of this feeling onto the outside world. Moreover, disgust towards objects of the external world is clearly distributed unevenly. This is explained by the fact that the protective effect of the projection process, as is easy to understand, the more significant it is, the more it reduces the tension of the conflict, weakening one or another of its poles; and since the idea of a crime (one pole of the conflict) “hardened” into the irreversible fact of a real murder and could no longer be shaken by any emotion, then the target protective process there become moments of experience that stand on the side of the second pole of the conflict, on the side of conscience. This is expressed primarily in the fact that for Raskolnikov it becomes unbearable to communicate with people close to him - his mother, sister, Razumikhin, since all their actions and conversations turn to the part of his soul that is in conflict with the idea of crime, nourishing and strengthening it, and consequently, strengthening both the internal conflict and its emotional expression - disgust and self-hatred. The defensive projection of these emotions, as a result of which Raskolnikov begins to feel “physical hatred” towards loved ones, thus not only takes their edge to the side, but directs them against the cause that gives rise to them.
However, about achieving any stable equilibrium there can be no question, since the emerging feeling of hatred towards loved ones, weakening one conflict, gives rise to a new one - it comes into conflict with love for them. Hatred prevents love and the expression of love; love prevents hatred and its expression. There is only one way out for consciousness - not to feel and express neither one nor the other, to distance yourself from loved ones. This alienation is realized by the hero in a quasi-spatial form: “Everything around us is definitely not happening here...,” Raskolnikov says to his mother, sister and Razumikhin, “here you are... as if I’m looking at you from a thousand miles away.”
Such a “solution” to another particular internal contradiction on the scale of the entire system of consciousness turns out to be “unprofitable”, since alienation strengthens the old initial conflict between the primordial need for people, the desire for them and isolation, isolation from people. In this way, the closure of Raskolnikov’s psychological world is strengthened, impeding deep human communication, which alone is capable of breaking the circles of individually unresolvable internal conflicts. An intense moral dialogue that pits conscience and crime - this core of the hero’s inner life turns out to be closed to every word, look, and intervention of the Other: access to one of its poles - conscience - was blocked by the just described mechanism of alienation, the second - crime - was closed to communication simply by virtue of its content, which implies secrecy in a social context. (66)
It would seem that the purely external fact of concealment is in fact not at all indifferent and not safe for the individual. “In everything secret, dark, mystical, insofar as it can have a decisive influence on the personality, Dostoevsky saw violence that destroys the personality.” Concealing the crime charges the already complex picture of Raskolnikov's internal conflicts with another pair of opposing forces. One of them pushes him away from close, deep communication (to keep the secret), the other pushes him to “publish” the secret (to ensure the possibility of communication). This contradiction, as in previous cases, is resolved by some compromise forms: firstly, the desire to communicate with strangers or unfamiliar people, and secondly, indirect “publications” of the secret. Raskolnikov painfully strives for any conversation in which at least an indirect, indirect discussion of his crime is possible (the most indicative in this regard is the conversation with Zametov in the tavern).
We see that every attempt to resolve any of the conflicts ultimately worsened the general state of affairs, giving rise to a new conflict, so that as a result a multiply intertwined conflict network was formed, the movement of consciousness in which only created additional tension, increasing the suffering of the hero and pushing it further and further a real way out, a real solution to the situation. There was no way out in the plane of this network; the life task was unsolvable. In order to solve this life aporia, to survive the created psychological situation, it was necessary to open it into some other dimension, to break out of vicious circle internal conflicts.
Among the hero's life movements, we discover a special series of actions and situations that, at least for a minute, heal him, ignite in him the lost meaning of existence. These are acts of service to people. The most significant of them was assistance to the family of the deceased Marmeladov. Having given all his money and promising to come back the next day, Raskolnikov, leaving, felt full of “one, new, immense sensation of a sudden surge of full and powerful life. This feeling could be like the feeling of being sentenced to death.” death penalty, to whom forgiveness is suddenly and unexpectedly declared." But why exactly do these acts turn out to be healing for Raskolnikov’s soul? Because, obviously, they are meaningful and objective psychological consequences confront the crime and, more broadly, the entire psychological world into which he was placed by the crime. Specifically: murder and robbery are opposed by something directly opposite - mercy and alms. In one case - selfish taking, in the other - a selfless gift. In one case, another person is a means, in another, an end. In the first case, the only unconditional value, and in general the true reality, is I myself: I affirm it outside of relation to the Other, disconnecting myself from everything and everyone; in the second, the value emphasis is transferred to the Other. The emotional structure of the first act is anger, hatred, etc., the second is love. This is the opposite of the internal semantic composition of these actions. No less important is the opposite of their consequences. The crime, while objectively separating the criminal from people, is also hidden by him and is therefore associated with the desire to isolate himself even more, to isolate himself (Raskolnikov more than once expresses a desire to be left alone); the gift, on the contrary, opens a person to meet the Other, evokes gratitude on his part, and love and gratitude on the part of the Other and their external expressions - a hug and a kiss, is what from the outside completes, affirms the Self with value, gives it reality and life [cf. : 23, p.39]. Polenka, having caught up with Raskolnikov, hugs him and promises to pray for him. “Five minutes later he was standing on the bridge exactly in the same place from which the woman had thrown herself just now. “Enough!” - he said decisively and solemnly, “away with mirages, away with feigned fears, away with ghosts!.. There is life!”
Serving people thus leads to the affirmation of life, to the transition from the feeling of death that predominated in Raskolnikov’s consciousness after the crime (suicidal intentions, identifying his room with a coffin, etc.) to the experience* of the fullness and value of life, or, in other words, We have here a transition from a situation of the psychological impossibility of life to a situation of its possibility. In even more pure form this transition appeared before the scene with Polenka. After one of the acts of service, Raskolnikov suddenly remembers that he read somewhere, “how one sentenced to death, an hour before death, says or thinks that if he had to live somewhere at a height, on a rock, and on such a narrow platform, so that only two legs can be placed - and all around there will be abysses, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude and an eternal storm - and remain like this, standing on a yard of space, all your life, a thousand years, eternity - then it’s better to live like that "Why die now! Just live, live and live! No matter how you live, just live!.. What a truth! Lord, what a truth!"
However, the thirst for life that is revived by serving people, the feeling of the possibility of life, “will and strength” is not the end of the experience, but only its beginning. It's just common ground, without which there can be no further movement, but the very desire to live does not yet contain answers to the questions of how to live, for what, with what, it does not contain meaningful solutions internal problems, there is no overcoming those reasons that corrupted life from the inside, deprived it of integrity and meaningfulness, and made it impossible. In the feeling of rebirth experienced by Raskolnikov, in itself there are no guarantees of its own continuation; they must be created by meaningful processing of consciousness and life, and first of all those life events and relationships that led to the discord of life. This processing at the beginning is subject to the principle of reality for our hero and consists of attempts to accept what happened in his life as it is: “... There is life! Haven’t I lived just now? My life has not yet died along with the old woman! heavenly and - that’s enough, mother, it’s time to rest!” In nothing, the dominance in the consciousness of the principle of reality is so clearly expressed as in the cult of power: “The kingdom of reason and light now and... will, and strength... and let’s see now, let’s measure ourselves now!” he added arrogantly. And further: “Strength, strength is needed: without strength you can’t take anything, but strength must be obtained by force...”
Such a “realistic” processing of events does not pick up the overcoming of “isolation and disconnection from humanity” that Raskolnikov’s acts of service began and even acts in the opposite direction, causing in him a surge of “pride and self-confidence,” reaffirming in his mind the attitude of “being above people,” fencing off him from people and closing his psychological world.
In addition to acts of service, two more series of actions in Raskolnikov’s behavior are objectively aimed at overcoming his “disconnection with humanity” - these are the already mentioned indirect “publications” of secrets and impulsive communication with strangers. They also evoke positive feelings in him. emotional states, which, however, in contrast to the joyful and even blissful mood that follows the service, are of a painful nature (for example, after a conversation with Zametov in the Crystal Palace, “he came out trembling from some kind of wild hysterical feeling, in which meanwhile was part of an unbearable pleasure...").
The reason for this painfulness is that these acts are not characterized by a radical reorientation of consciousness (namely, the transfer of the value center of gravity to the Other), and therefore, while solving some of the hero’s private conflicts, they do not transfer him to a new psychological world into which he is at least for a minute is introduced by acts of service, but only touches on this world in order to immediately return Raskolnikov’s consciousness to the old state, piling up additional mental complications.
But if we leave aside the differences between the internal content and consequences of the “publication” of secrets and impulsive communication, on the one hand, and mercy, on the other, we can say that all these actions were of a significant nature for the life process: without them, even to a small extent degree and for a short time relieving mental anguish and humbling internal contradictions hero, they could cause irreversible changes in consciousness and psyche. And at the same time, these actions were of a meaningful nature, they hinted, each for its part, at a certain one, not yet identified by the hero, way out of the created situation. life situation, on the path in which these actions will be present, transformed within the framework of a new holistic form that synthesizes them. (These were like components of a medicine, which individually, perhaps, could have a slight positive effect, however, at the cost of no less strong negative ones." side effects", but only together they acquired the quality of a healing substance.)
This form was a “content-time series”: guilt-repentance-redemption-bliss. “Entering” and “passing” along this series was for Raskolnikov a means of building and establishing that healing psychological world, to which he was already able to connect for a moment, almost by accident, groping in a spontaneous search for a solution to a life crisis, special actions that served as a kind of symbolic entrances into this world .
However, it is one thing to sometimes “get” into it and quite another to “settle” in it; To do this, you need to correctly recognize, internally accept and spread throughout your life new system values. It was objectively actualized by the mentioned actions (acts of service) in Raskolnikov’s consciousness (but, however, was not subjectively recognized as such), it also underlies the above-mentioned content-time series.
But what does it mean to accept a new value system? This means, first of all, to abandon the old, i.e., to abandon what I identified myself through, i.e., to abandon myself. But it is impossible to do this on your own, individually, just as it is impossible to lift yourself by the hair; for this, you fundamentally need an Other on whom you could rely. Moreover, rely unconditionally, completely rely on him and trust him. This Other for Raskolnikov was Sonya Marmeladova.
Her image initially opposes in Raskolnikov’s mind the crime and the ideology corresponding to it (“I chose you a long time ago to tell you this, even when my father spoke about you, and when Lizaveta was alive...”); she is the living embodiment of a worldview and attitude that is directly opposite to the one in which he was immersed. Getting closer to Sonya is the beginning of entering a new world for Raskolnikov, about which he receives an emotional “prediction” twice - first, he experienced a feeling of rebirth after the already mentioned act of mercy towards Sonya’s family, and then, immediately after confessing to her, when Sonya “she hugged him and squeezed him tightly with her hands,” “a feeling that had long been unfamiliar to him surged into his soul like a wave and immediately softened it.” This blissful sensation belongs to a new structure of consciousness. In other words, although this schematism “guilt-repentance-redemption-bliss” is extended into a content-time series, this does not mean that subsequent elements of the series appear in consciousness only after passing through the previous stages. They resonate psychologically and are present in consciousness all together, like a gestalt, although with varying degrees of expression in different phases of the series. Bliss is given already at the beginning of the redemptive path, as if it were an emotional and semantic advance necessary to overcome it.
In Sonya's love, Raskolnikov receives a reliable point of support from which he can, so to speak, carry out work on the value restructuring of his consciousness. First of all, he needed to rethink his crime from the perspective of a new value system. Confession of a crime is only the first, external step of such a rethink. Repentance follows, psychological meaning which consists in penetrating into the motives of one’s action, in finding its roots and sources. Carried out individually, this process can be as deep as desired, but within itself it does not contain any criteria of truth, does not know which of the possible interpretations to choose, threatens to go into the evil infinity of continuous reflexive conversions, and only in the dialogical form of confession can it be positive completed. Raskolnikov offers Sonya several completely psychologically reliable explanations of his crime, which she (and he himself) nevertheless rejects until it comes to the hero’s realization that he “only wanted to dare”:
“I didn’t kill in order to help my mother - nonsense! I didn’t kill so that, having received money and power, I would become a benefactor of humanity... And it wasn’t money, the main thing, that I needed, Sonya, when I killed. .. I needed to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a louse, like everyone else, or a man? Will I be able to cross or not! Will I dare to bend down and take it or not? Am I a trembling creature or do I have the right..."
But why exactly did Sonya’s “want to dare” cry (“Oh, be silent, be silent... You have departed from God, and God struck you down, betrayed you to the devil!..”) is recognized as the true and final explanation? Because “there is nowhere else to go.” “, because in this explanation the most terrible thing from the point of view of Christian consciousness is “pride” - the beginning and source of all sin.
As a result of the confession, the hero accepts (although not completely) Sonino’s attitude towards crime, thereby entering into schematism no longer from the side of bliss, but from the side of guilt and at the same time separating himself from the crime, disidentifying with it (“... this old lady’s devil killed, not I"). Not only the murder itself, but also its origins and consequences - the desire to “be above and beyond people,” the prevailing feeling of death, the disintegration of personality, isolation and secrecy - all this is implicitly contained in the religious idea of sinfulness. What is the meaning of awareness of "sinfulness" with psychological point vision? The very fact of the murder was meaningless for Raskolnikov; there was no way out of it. From recognizing it as a crime there was a path to confessing the crime and accepting social punishment. Awareness of it as “sinful” led to a value-based condemnation of the act and opened up a meaningful prospect for the hero to overcome its origins and consequences.
Since the psychological basis of Raskolnikov’s “theory” and crime was the attitude of “being above people” (= “pride”), it was necessary to destroy this attitude in order to restore the personality. From here it becomes clear the vertical orientation of the beginning of Raskolnikov’s redemptive path from the ascension to “above” - “down”, which had such disastrous consequences, symbolically expressed in three kisses: first, Sonechka’s feet, this very “humiliated being”, then his mother’s feet and, finally, the earth along Sonya’s advice: “Go..., stand at the crossroads, bow [from top to bottom. - F.V.], first kiss the ground that you have desecrated, and then bow to the whole world, on all four sides, and tell everyone, out loud : “I killed!” Then God will send you life again.” This is at the same time the ultimate opening of psychological space - the secret must be “published” in the “square”, only from here, from the elements of the people’s lower classes, is a true revival to life possible. "
As a result of all these actions, Raskolnikov’s consciousness manages to connect to “schematism” from time to time, each time penetrating deeper and deeper into it. Subjectively, this penetration is expressed in a “soul-softening” feeling, in a presentiment radical change in oneself, in the clarity, enlightenment of consciousness.
However, the old structure of consciousness resists these changes. There is a struggle between two systems of consciousness, old and new, for the right to determine the hero’s worldview and attitude. At some moments, a kind of diffusion of these systems is observed, when in one thought, statement, or mood of Raskolnikov, the ideas and sensations of both systems are co-present and ideologically opposed to each other. Sometimes there are sharp jumps from one system to another (having felt “caustic hatred” for Sonya, Raskolnikov the next moment realizes that it was love and he simply mistook one feeling for another). Even in penal servitude, which in the new structure was supposed to be conceptualized as atonement through suffering, the struggle between the two structures weakens very slowly. And only at the very end of the novel, when Raskolnikov really fell in love with Sonya, a turning point in this struggle occurs, and only then does the prehistory end and “the story of the gradual renewal of man, the story of his gradual rebirth, the gradual transition from one world to another begins...”
Needless to say, the example of Raskolnikov’s experience, both due to literary convention and due to the atypicality of its content for modern reality, cannot be the basis for broad generalizations. However, the general knowledge of the material and Dostoevsky's psychological insight make this example a very convenient illustration of many of the mechanisms of experience. Therefore, we considered it possible to complete the study with a detailed analysis of this single case, trying, on the one hand, to leave in the reader’s mind a vivid impression of the entire complexity of the internal dynamics of the activity of experience, which cannot be reduced to the automatic activation of “defense mechanisms,” and, on the other hand, to demonstrate that The introduced theoretical means allow even such a difficult thing for an objective psychological approach as religious experience to be included in the sphere of strictly scientific psychological explanation.
On Sunday evening, after a serious and long illness, Fedor Efimovich Vasilyuk, president of the Association of Understanding Psychotherapy, doctor, died psychological sciences, professor of the department of individual and group psychotherapy MGPPU, chief Researcher laboratory of the fundamentals of psychotherapy of the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education.
Fedor Efimovich Vasilyuk - an outstanding Christian psychologist our time . He is known for his work in the field of methodology of psychology, psychology of consciousness and Christian psychology. In his works, he developed the concepts of crisis situations and gave a typology of experiences. He created his own psychotechnical system - “Understanding Psychotherapy”. Vasilyuk was sure that the experience of grief is one of the most mysterious manifestations of a person’s mental life.
In his article “Surviving Grief,” he wrote: “How miraculously can a person, devastated by loss, be reborn and fill his world with meaning? How can he, confident that he has forever lost the joy and desire to live, restore his mental balance, feel the colors and taste of life? How is suffering transformed into wisdom? All this is not rhetorical figures admiration for the strength of the human spirit, and pressing questions, to know specific answers to which you need to know, if only because sooner or later we all have, whether out of professional duty or human duty, to console and support grieving people.”
For the psychological community, the death of Fyodor Efimovich is an irreparable loss.
Hegumen Peter (Meshcherinov), rector of the Danilov Monastery metochion:
– On September 17 at 22.30, after a serious and long-term illness, Fyodor Efimovich Vasilyuk, a Christian, scientist, psychologist, teacher, reposed in the Lord. This is one of the brightest and most significant people for me. Rest in peace.
Vladimir Strelov, editor-in-chief of the Tradition charity foundation:
- Rest, O Lord, the soul of Your servant. Amazing. Personality. Christian. He was the spiritual child of Father Viktor Mamontov. Doctor of Science, student of A. Leontyev. I was lucky enough to learn a little psychotherapy from him. His texts and speeches contain the highest culture, modesty towards himself, and humor.
Alisa Kuznetsova, psychologist, psychotherapist:
“Suddenly at night I rushed to check my phone - maybe I was dreaming after all.” Some kind of haze, some kind of phantasmagoria... For some reason it was easier to believe that this world around was made up and unreal than that Fyodor Efimovich died. I wrote and re-read it slowly, syllable by syllable, “Fyodor Efimovich died” - to stop denying, to somehow get used to the new contours. We often talked about death in classes, in supervision, during numerous discussions.
Fedor Efimovich helped us touch to the topic of the reality of death. He helped me find the means to somehow handle her and work with her. Who should I go to now? After all, it has already become a habit - to correlate your empathy with it, your internal response to difficult question– both in work and in life. And now I really want to discuss this with him, all that is now screaming, beating, hurting, preventing me from breathing, so that he can suggest, guide, support, help me survive and comprehend.
Anna Leontyeva wrote that it is so important to hear the memories and testimonies of other people about Fyodor Efimovich in order to complete our work of experiencing grief. We all did not go to bed for a long time, because it was impossible - we prayed, wrote, talked, shared with each other - who had a memorable conversation, event, last meeting, SMS.
They remembered funny and sad cases - so different and so similar: how he taught, how much he helped - everyone, literally everyone, for how many he became the STARTER in the profession. And so gradually at night, from the ghostliness, dullness, and non-existence, some incredible mighty firmament emerged, a path of memory and gratitude - dedicated to him and uniting (gathering) us all. And continuous dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and shared enormous pain, and mutual understanding, and mutual support.
Dear colleagues, there are so many of us! And what kind of family and friends we are with you - with all our contradictions, disagreements, and disputes. How important it is for us to preserve this amazing brotherhood. Thank you Fedor Efimovich for you! Thank you all for it!
Bright Memory of our Teacher.
Matvey Berkhin, child psychologist:
- Tears on eyes. How rich he was - spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, how generously he shared it. What were public performance, what “student-oriented” seminars, what articles – a real feast. How he undertook to supervise my work 1.5 months before the defense, how he was ready to sit with me, a good-for-nothing student, and discuss my semi-fake work, meet at 10 pm or 9 am at the Patriarch’s, how he clarified before the defense how many children I have , to screw it up in your speech... What depth and nobility in everything, what clarity of thought. And how this extended to everyone who studied with him.
I didn’t continue to study with him in those two years after my master’s degree, and I saw him once or twice after his defense, and at the defense I didn’t really thank him - I handed him a disheveled bouquet and a bottle of wine, which he accidentally mentioned once at a seminar - and the wine wasn’t even the same thing, but similar in name... I won’t see it again. See you, Fyodor Efimovich - although it’s hard to believe that we will be somewhere in the same place as you with Vladyka Anthony and Father Victor - but I’m trying to believe. So see you later.
Archpriest Vyacheslav Perevezentsev, rector of St. Nicholas Church. Makarovo, Moscow region:
- What a terrible September. They just reported that Fyodor Efimovich Vasilyuk has died. An outstanding psychologist, the wisest person. I had the opportunity to study with him, we communicated, he was my daughter’s godfather. How many times has he helped and supported me and my loved ones. He was sick for a long time, but it is still very difficult to accept. Fyodor Efimovich loved Metropolitan Anthony very much, and therefore it was his words that are remembered that evening: “We know nothing about death. We don’t know what happens to us at the moment of dying, but we at least know in concept what eternal life is. Each of us knows from experience that there are some moments when he no longer lives in time, but with such a fullness of life, such a jubilation that does not just belong to the earth. Therefore, the first thing we must teach ourselves and others is to prepare not for death, but for life. And if we talk about death, then talk about it only as a door that will open wide and allow us to enter eternal life.” For the servant of God Theodore today the Lord opened this door to Eternity. May God rest his soul!
Fyodor Efimovich ends his article “Surviving Grief” with an episode from psychotherapeutic practice. We present it here because the teacher’s words are the best consolation to his students: “I once had to work with a young painter who lost his daughter during the Armenian earthquake. As our conversation came to an end, I asked him to close his eyes, imagine an easel with a white sheet of paper in front of him and wait until some image appeared on it.
An image of a house and a funeral stone with a lit candle appeared. Together we begin to complete the mental picture, and mountains appeared behind the house, blue sky and bright sun. I ask you to focus on the sun, to consider how its rays fall. And so, in a picture evoked by the imagination, one of the rays of the sun is united with the flame of a funeral candle: the symbol of the deceased daughter is united with the symbol of eternity. Now we need to find a way to distance ourselves from these images. This means is the frame into which the father mentally places the image. Wooden frame. The living image finally becomes a picture of memory, and I ask my father to squeeze this imaginary picture with his hands, appropriate it, absorb it and place it in his heart. The image of the deceased daughter becomes a memory - the only way to reconcile the past with the present.”
Prepared by Daria Roshchenya