Moving Opposites in the Self: A Heraclitean approach

It is possible to think about the relation between opposites in two fundamentally different ways. One way is in the tradition of the father of Western scientific thinking, Aristotle, who posed that the opposite poles of a certain polarity are in essence mutually exclusive. Another way is indicated by Heraclitus, who argued for the coexistence of opposites, a view largely in conflict with the prevailing Aristotelian logic. In the present article we will, following the Heraclitean view, describe an empirical phenomenon in which one pair of opposites moves, in the evolution of meanings, towards another. We can refer to such a felt shift briefly as ‘moving opposites’. In its most simplified form this phenomenon can be explained as follows. Suppose a psychologist invites a subject to describe two experiences of an opposite quality, for example, the experience of love and the experience of hate in his or her own life. The two experiences can be considered two opposing forms of ‘personal meaning’. Next, the client is invited to construct a third meaning in which the two original experiences are combined in the attempt to arrive at some ‘unification of opposites’ (e.g., a personal meaning is created such as ‘ambivalences’ in which the love and hate come together). With reference to this combined experience there are four theoretical possibilities:

1. the third meaning is attracted by one of the original poles and mostly assumes the experiential quality of this pole (e.g., love predominates);

2. the third meaning mostly assumes the quality of the other pole (e.g., hate predominates);

3. the third meaning is some combination of the original meanings (e.g., love and hate coexist in genuine ambivalence); or

4. the third meaning transcends the two original meanings and moves to another polarity (e.g., ‘My problem is really about autonomy versus dependence’).