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We often confuse positive thinking with magical thinking. It seems to us that with the power of thought we can change the course of events, and as a result we lose touch with reality. How not to fall under the power of the illusion of omnipotence inherited from our childhood?
“You don’t get what you want simply because you haven’t learned to think positively,” a friend who has been attending positive thinking training for three years tells me. – To get rid of loneliness, you need to mentally “ask” for someone to give you love. And if a conflict arose with another person, imagine how you put your offender in a bubble or in a cocoon – and he will stop causing you negative feelings.
Thinking that she was applying the lessons of positive psychology, in fact, my friend plunged into the world of magical thinking.
“Very often we confuse positive thinking with magical,” comments Gestalt therapist Nifont Dolgopolov, “however, there is a huge difference between them. Magical thinking is an irrational belief that by the power of our thoughts we can change reality, influence other people, objects or events.
In the logic of magical thinking, it is enough to imagine, to imagine what we are striving for, and everything will work out by itself, without any effort on our part. While in positive thinking there is one significant addition: our thoughts and our positive attitude do not change the world around us, but our actions. And only through them they already have an impact on the world around us.
Tune in to the fact that we can find a common language with the interlocutor, we begin to behave kindly, attentively, friendly – and the conversation turns out. There is no magic here. Negative thoughts also do not have a direct impact on the world – but they make us more vulnerable, we lose faith in ourselves.
The belief that our thoughts can harm other people is the result of magical thinking.
“The super-popular trainings or positive thinking courses actually teach the principles of magical thinking,” agrees Jungian analyst Lev Khegai. – The interest in him is understandable: it is much easier to “catch a wave of luck”, “think with excellent prospects for the development of the Earth”, “send waves of love and acceptance into the world” in the hope of waiting for reciprocity, rather than learning to build relationships with other people, understand their feelings, express your own emotions, coping with losses.
Illusion of omnipotence
Magical thinking is the natural way of thinking of young children who are not yet able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. They think that “want” and “do” are one and the same.
“For an infant, the world and his own “I” are one whole,” explains psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams in the book “Psychoanalytic Diagnosis. Understanding personality structure in the clinical process. – This means that he perceives the source of all events as internal: if he is cold and his mother, noticing this, warms him, the child has an experience of magically obtaining heat by himself. The child is not yet able to realize that control is outside of himself – in other (separate from him) people.
However, growing up, the child comes to terms with the fact that neither he nor any other person has unlimited possibilities. The trace of magical thinking remains in adulthood. Thanks to this feeling of omnipotence, experienced in early childhood, we experience a sense of our own competence, a sense of our effectiveness.
Often magical thinking “awakens” in us at those moments when we feel guilty for something that happened to someone we know. For example, when a person whom we did not love passes away. We feel guilty, as if our thoughts could have caused his death. The belief that our thoughts can harm other people is also the result of magical thinking. But we are not gods, to create the world only by the power of our desire.
Protection from fear
The belief that the power of thought can influence natural phenomena, people or events was characteristic of all primitive people. For a long time, anthropologists believed that the bison and horses depicted in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira (France) reproduce scenes of real hunting.
Today they are confident that animal drawings are evidence of the magical thinking of ancient people (the so-called hunting magic). With their help, the ancestors tried to appease fate so that it turned out to be favorable and provided them with abundant prey in the hunt. The French archaeologist Salomon Reinac was the first to make such an assumption at the beginning of the XNUMXth century.
“Magical thinking protected ancient people from fears of an incomprehensible and dangerous world,” explains Nifont Dolgopolov. – They believed that they could control it, influence the course of events. Dreams and fantasies also help our contemporaries to “hide” from their existential fears, from the fear of death, the loss of loved ones, and in this sense, magical thinking protects.
Fate … or is it neurosis?
But the magic of primitive thinking is dangerous: it creates the illusion of control over the world and makes it impossible to realistically assess situations, people, and ourselves. Sigmund Freud also noticed that some people are always captivated by dramatic life scenarios, they live as if they are being pursued by some kind of inexorable rock.
They fall in love – their partner leaves them for no apparent reason. They get married – the wife dies because she suffered from an incurable disease. Friends betray them, things fall into decay. Everything happens as if some force or fate pushes them into unpleasant situations or brings them together with people who should be avoided.
Positive thinking differs from magic in that it consists in a sober assessment of all scenarios
For psychoanalysts, there is no black magic in these life stories. These people suffer from “destiny neurosis”: an unconscious sense of guilt pushes them to punish themselves. It is useless to go to the sorcerer who will remove the spell. Fate will haunt a person until he realizes what desires or actions seem so “criminal” to him that they cause such a strong unconscious feeling of guilt. And, of course, not a sorcerer can help here, but a good psychotherapist or psychoanalyst.
Getting rid of illusions
“Recently, on my way to the airport, I got stuck in traffic and, if not for the exercise I learned in training, I could have missed my plane,” my positive-minded friend tells me. “I imagined the highway and concentrated with all my might on the thought that now the cars will finally go faster.”
Listening to the story of a friend who nevertheless managed to catch the plane five minutes before the end of registration, I thought that it would be much more positive not to go through the city by taxi during rush hour, or to leave at least half an hour earlier.
“Genuine positive thinking just differs from magical thinking in that it consists in a realistic attitude to life and to one’s own capabilities, in a sober assessment of all (and unpleasant) scenarios,” Lev Khegay is sure. “But it is often very difficult to give up the childish belief that we can achieve what we want by influencing people or events. It is difficult to accept the fact that life is full of uncertainty and anxiety, that you need to make decisions, make choices and be responsible for your actions. But it is this attitude towards life that is really positive.”