“Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.”
— Erich Fromm
This quote by Fromm has always felt like home to me. I admire him not only as a social psychologist, but as a creative thinker, a humanistic philosopher, and above all, a true existential artist of living.
His writing is my playground. I go there often to find both warmth and congruence, seriousness and playfulness, practicality and light. I recognize myself there - someone who takes life both seriously and not at all (and, honestly, most of the time, not :).
His work reminds me of the beautiful non-duality of our body, mind, heart, and spirit, especially the tangling (and untangling) between the Body and Mind. Our mind likes to draw conclusions, find solutions, and “figure it out”, while our body has the gift, yet isn’t that good at holding different realities (at times, the contrary).
So I often wonder: in those heated moments, when we most want to lean in, what if we actually step back? What if we sit in silence without explaining, defending, or validating? Is it okay to not know? (And maybe—how lucky we are not to always know.)
In therapy, I witness this split all the time—the distance between thinking and feeling, brain and heart. Some clients act out on a strong emotion before it’s fully understood; others over-intellectualize until they sound like robots performing “rightness,” “efficiency,” or even under the name of “love.”
My interventions vary accordingly. With the overly rigid, I might ask, “If we remove your thinking brain, what is your body experiencing right here and now?”—a gentle invitation to rejoin mind and body. With the overly vulnerable, I might say, “I can feel your strong feeling in my body—can we let it flow for a few more days without taking action?” And with the anxious or the paranoid, I sometimes offer silence: “Can we just sit together and tolerate the discomfort?”
In San Francisco (especially in San Francisco), there’s no shortage of intellect or passion. They often come hand in hand—brilliant, dramatic, and caculatedly performative. But what I long to see more of is the middle ground: where hearts can sit with their feelings, minds can think with honesty, and both can coexist—congruent, grounded, and in-between.