Ambivalence -- the experience of feeling two ways about changing your behavior -- is a core aspect of the human experience. This post is the first in a two-part series about what ambivalence is and what it has to do with motivation. In Two Minds Theory we talk about "intention-behavior gaps" that arise between the Narrative mind's statements about the future and the Intuitive mind's selection of behaviors in the present: The gap arises because of a fundamental difference in immediacy between the mental system that controls language and the one that controls actual behavior. And in motivational interviewing, a counselor's fundamental goal is to "explore and resolve ambivalence." Ambivalence is sometimes seen as a problem to be solved, but it's helpful instead to think about ambivalence as just a part of being human. The less we blame ourselves for feeling ambivalence, the easier it becomes for us to work through it in order to select one course of action or another.
Ambivalence is often depicted with an image like the one above: An angel on one shoulder whispering to us about one course of action, while a devil on the other argues for its opposite. This conflict-driven view of ambivalence is a very old metaphor. I recently came across it in the writings of the 14th-century German mystic Meister Eckhart:
You must know that Saint Gregory says, and so by one accord do all the philosophers, that every man by the very fact of his being has a good genius, an angel, and a bad genius, a devil. The good angel counsels and tends without ceasing to good, to things godly, things virtuous and heavenly and eternal. The bad genius counsels and tends all the while to things temporal, impermanent, vicious, devilish, and evil. This same evil genius is forever parleying with the outward man [i.e., the senses] and through him succeeds in covertly getting at the inner man [i.e., the soul]. (Eckhart, 1327, "The Nobleman," in Meister Eckhart, from Whom God Hid Nothing. Boulder CO: New Seeds Publishing, 1996).
Interestingly, the Homer Simpson picture at the top of this post is historically accurate: The devil was believed to sit on the left shoulder, and the angel on the right. (Left in Latin is “sinister”). That’s also why you’re supposed to throw salt over your left shoulder in the old superstition: You’re aiming for the devil, and wouldn’t want to hit the angel by mistake!
The image was already old when Eckhart used it. The original may be from the philosopher Origen of Alexandra (185-253 CE), who wrote:
To every [one] there are two attending angels, the one of justice and the other of wickedness. If there be good thoughts in our heart, and if righteousness be welling up in our soul, it can scarcely be doubted that an angel of the Lord is speaking to us. If, however, the thoughts of our heart be turned to evil, an angel of the devil is speaking to us. (Homily 12, from The Faith of the Early Fathers, Vol. 1, ed. William A. Jurgens, 201).
Based on when and where Origen was writing, he might have been appropriating and Christianizing an idea from
Plato, that of two horses with a
human charioteer: "one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him" (Phaedrus, 246b). And Plato was borrowing an image from even earlier cultures in Egypt or Mesopotamia. In short, then, the idea of ambivalence as a contest between two opposing mental forces is as old as recorded human knowledge.
Something that I find helpful in Eckhart's version is that he avoids dualistic thinking in which one side of the ambivalence is all good and the other is all bad. He does make the typical medieval distinction between "sensitive soul" and "rational soul," which I have argued elsewhere to be the same as the distinction between the Intuitive and the Narrative mind. The "outer man" (Intuitive mind) is connected to the senses and is characterized as "the old man, the earthly man, the outward man, the enemy, the servant." The "inner man" (Narrative mind) is connected to the will or the spirit, and is described as "the new man, the heavenly man, the young man, the friend, the nobleman" (p. 91). But despite all of these accolades for the Narrative mind, Eckhart nevertheless identifies positive and negative expressions of both mental systems.
If taken in the wrong direction, the outer man "completely dissipates the powers of the soul ...; those are the people who direct all their aims and intelligence toward transient possessions" or who pay so much attention to their physical needs that they are "like the beasts without reason" (p. 117). But Eckhart doesn't see the Intuitive level as completely without merit. The outer man has "powers" such as memory, intellect, and will, which can be used for good purposes in the world rather than for self-interest: "A religious man who loves God uses the powers of the soul in the outward man no further than what the five senses require as a matter of necessity" (p. 116). There can be ambivalence just within the Intuitive mind, as seen in the first quotation above where the angel and the devil both speak to the "outer man" rather than representing a conflict between the Narrative and Intuitive systems.
Similarly, the "inner man" (Narrative system) can become focused on unhelpful ideas, so that "the soul draws to herself all the powers which she has lent to the five senses" and spends them fruitlessly. "This man is then called senseless and crazy, for his object is an intellectual image or something transcending reason without an image" (p. 117). I gave examples of some misfunctions of the Narrative mind in a recent blog post about conspiracy theories, and in an older post about why people's political views are resistant to change even in the face of new evidence. On the other hand, the Narrative mind can represent the "rational soul" that leads people to good ends, and that enables them to resist difficulties along the way: "A person who wishes to begin a good life should be like a man who draws a circle. Let him get the center in the right place and keep it so, and the circumference will be good. In other words, let a man first learn to fix his heart on God and then his good deeds will have virtue; but if a man's heart is unsteady, even the great things he does will be of small advantage" (pp. 5-6).
Eckhart (and Plato) see the soul as a go-between that bridges the inner and outer man, perhaps corresponding to what we might now call attention or consciousness. The Narrative mind is tempted on the one had by rationalizations and excuses, but can also bring to bear logical thought and an orientation toward others, The Intuitive mind can be led astray by transient feelings and perceptions, but also offers the benefits of learned competencies and holistic perceptions. The conflict of ambivalence, then, is not between the Narrative and Intuitive minds, but between competing pressures at both levels. It may help to understand that there's no way for us to avoid ambivalence, so we shouldn't blame ourselves when it occurs. Instead, we can learn to use ambivalence as a source of information and energy, in order to help us move forward.
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