by Gordon Cappelletty and Romano Màdera, published 2022

There are a lot of ideas packed into Into the Maelstrom: Toward a Theory of Chaos and Crisis.⊕
Into the Maelstrom: Toward a Theory of Chaos and Crisis, Gordon Cappelletty and Romano Màdera (2022)

Each chapter could be a book onto itself. The brevity makes the book enjoyable to read, but it’s not without trade-offs.

Homeostasis and Crisis

Gordon Cappelletty uses Gerald Caplan’s 1964 homeostatic model to launch to book: “all organisms strive to maintain equilibrium both internally within one’s body and mind, as well as externally in one’s relationships with others and the environment. A crisis is triggered when this homeostatic state is threatened in some major way, and the organism will immediately react with attempts to achieve some return to the original homeostasis” (27). Cappelletty defines the destabilizing event “as a threat to our sense of certainty” to provide a more concrete description of what’s happening in a crisis.Credited to neuropsychologist David Rock in a 2009 issue of Psychology Today (29)

This framing immediately brings to mind Buddhist philosophy where a past pattern (i.e. what was certainCertainty is presumably based on knowledge, a theme I also touch on in Knowledge As an Impairment

) is a ghost from the past that haunts you. Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod clarifies this in Reflections on Silver River:

The world that generated [the certainty] no longer exists. Whenever it runs, it draws you into the illusion of that world. If you try to satisfy it, you have accepted that world, and you are in its power, with all its demands, dysfunctions and contradictions. This is the opposite of the freedom you seek.

And like a good Buddhist paradox, Into the Maelstrom shows that while the brain reacts to uncertainty as though it were a trauma to be avoided, it is also the source of growth and regeneration:

When we enter a period of crisis our brain becomes malleable and ready to adapt to the newfound reality. The more profound the crisis, the more open the brain is to change and, ultimately, to growth.The author continues to make an interesting point on raising a child: “One of the reasons why parents are advised not to step in prematurely to resolve a crisis is because it deprives the now plastic brain of the opportunity to alter itself and develop new neural networks in order to adapt to the new realities.” (68/9)

I am encouraged that Cappelletty does not shy away from this overlap with spiritual practice. Crises can be mitigated by a belief in something larger. He believes the discipline of psychotherapy should engage with spiritual aspects with the same rigor as well-trodden ground like childhood, sex, and work. But the author is also humble enough to acknowledge that spiritual matters are a complex terrain that many therapists are probably ill-equipped to navigate.This book helps me realize that some familiarity with Buddhism would be a pre-requisite for any psychotherapist I would work with.

While I appreciate this type of professional critique, it probably widened the scope a bit too much. The book starts to slide into sweeping generalizations about younger generations and the treatment for a supposed pandemic of nihilism. These are lofty claims that would require a great amount of evidence beyond a citation of Umberto Galimberti’s The Disquieting Guest.

Love

Into the Maelstrom shifts registers when the co-author Romano Màdera takes over. It’s an unusual structure - essentially half the book is Cappelletty and the other half is Màdera - but it didn’t bother me.

Màdera considers the condition of the maelstrom in the widest lens possible - sweeping over centuries and cultures anchored only by the question of “love.”

Love may seem like a curious theme. But anyone who has experienced love and loss personally knows the maelstrom.

Màdera thus considers how love is conceived across grand spans. Such as ancient Israel. Or countries where arranged marriages are still common. And even in settings where the entrenched patriarchal order is being challenged. This thread leads him to the current state of affairs which he deems a “new reign of religion without religion” - capitalist societies that have a belief that all consumer desires are good desires (197).Norbert Wiener came to similar conclusions when examining the “free market” and homeostasis in his 1948 book Cybernetics. “There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory. […] Even in the case of two players, the theory is complicated, although it often leads to the choice of a definite line of play. In many cases, however, where there are three players, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, when the number of players is large, the result is one of extreme indeterminacy and instability.”

Arrow must go up after all. The value of your house must go up; the level of GDP must go up; the stock market must go up; etc….

I see that we are a people that often confuse selfish desire with selfless love. I’m not sure if this trait is hard-wired or imbued, but Màdera boldly states “that we must leave behind the surviving ideology” which separates us and embrace a more universal truth that “love is said, and is made, in many ways” (207/8).

Màdera is essentially echoing his co-author: ideologies provide a sense of certainty. But the paradox is that this environment of ideological certainty - which denies plurality - creates the maelstrom which subjects us all.

Certainly Death is Certain

So what is certain? Cappelletty assures us that love is not certain.

All of the above is to say that the dictum that one cannot love another until one first loves the self is backward. In reality, we cannot love another until we have first been loved. Thus, the capacity to love, while innate, needs to be awakened and nurtured in the early relationships with the one who first loves us. (110)

And in my favorite part of the book we arrive back to something akin to a Mahayana Buddhist sutra; Cappelletty suggests that even death is not certain.I’m specifically thinking of the Lankavatara Sutra. From Section LXXIII: “What is only mind cannot be seen / nor is a divided mind perceived / when grasper and grasped do not exist / the eternal and momentary are both transcended.” And also “Mahamati, nirvana is not annihilation or death. If nirvana were death, there would be the continuity of something reborn. And if nirvana were annihilation, it could be characterized as something created. Therefore, nirvana is free from annihilation and free from death. This is why it is the refuge of practitioners.”

A third perspective exists as developed by the American research scientist, Robert Lanza (Lanza & Berman, 2010), who postulates that death does not really exist. According to his theory, death is an illusion created by our consciousness trapped inside a physical body. Calling his theory Biocentrism, Lanza reiterates the observation made in the third chapter of this book that not a single theory of biology or psychology can explain how consciousness can arise from matter. He points out that space and time are simply rules created by our brains in order for our consciousness to organize our experiences and call them “reality.” His argument is, therefore, that the concept of death as we know it simply does not exist because there are no real limits by which it can be defined. According to this view, our fear of death is really a fear of the unknown because death seems so real and permanent when the reality is, we don’t know what death will bring. (136)

We know that certainty is an illusion. And perhaps it is true that death does not exist either. I’d suggest the same could also be said of homeostasis in spite of the decades of research in psychology, physiology, economics, and cybernetics to show “real limits by which [homeostasis] can be defined.” If this is the case, the Buddhist in me would also suggest that the maelstrom may not exist either.