Hello, my name is Candida Yates, and welcome to Psycho Cultural, the podcast that uses psychosocial thinking to explore and unpack the meaning of key words, ideas, and themes that are currently circulating in culture, politics, and society.

And today we're going to discuss the idea of manifesting.

And the person I've asked to help us do this is my colleague, Dr.

Nicola Diamond, who is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in private practice.

Nicola is an attachment and trauma specialist with over 30 years of experience, and she's also a scholar, having published many books and articles on psychosocial themes.

Nicola and I used to teach together, in fact, on the psychosocial studies degree at the University of East London.

So welcome Nicola, it's great that you've come on the podcast.

Bye.

Hi.

So what we're going to do is then is talk about manifesting.

And maybe it's helpful to begin by defining it and thinking about why it might be such a popular term.

Well, according to Psychology Today, this online journal, manifesting is the idea that through the power of belief, we can think a goal into becoming reality.

So it's a kind of magical thinking.

And according to one lifestyle website, The Good Trade, manifesting is similar to the law of attraction.

It stems from a belief that the universe, spelt with a capital U, creates and provides for you that which your thoughts are focused on.

It says manifestation includes intentional actions

challenging negative emotions and uses techniques rooted in science and psychology.

So they often cite sciences behind it.

And manifestation has also, and I suppose it's useful to say that it's exploded in the media and culture.

And this really happened during the pandemic and during lockdown when many of us felt pretty hopeless and helpless.

and Google reported a 400% increase for the term and hashtag manifestation on TikTok has a collective 7.3 billion views.

At a time when it can feel like the world's going to hell in a handcart and that we lack agency to make real change, the suggestion that manifestation can turn hashtag goals into real life achievements is actually quite appealing.

So there we are.

That's my little introduction to manifesting.

And I don't know about you, I don't know, be interesting to hear if your patients ever refer to it, because I know that my students used to, my nephews, nieces, it's become really popular as a term, particularly amongst the younger generation.

So Nicola, what do you think?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely, yes, it does come up, but it comes up a lot.

It does come up with people I know, it's sort of all around.

And you're quite right that it is kind of akin to magical thinking and wish fulfillment, you know, if we're using that kind of Freudian model.

And it's the idea, well, it's the all-abiding belief that the self

can create reality, really.

You know, that there is this power of the mind.

There is this power of subjectivity.

And law of attraction is part of a notion of manifesting.

Law of attraction is when the energy that we produce with the convictions of our mind coheres with the energy

and the vibes, if you like, that are in the universe, and they kind of harmonize together.

And there are various things they suggest if we're wanting to manifest.

One is that you need to believe that you've already achieved, obtained what you want and desire.

And the other thing that's important is

actually to let go of wanting it, but keep going with the action in order to get it.

But if we look at it further, I think the more difficult part of this idea of manifesting is the idea that the universe will comply with what we want.

You know, it's the idea that the universe

is sort of an effect of the self.

And I'm thinking, actually, if you take it to an extreme, which it does actually do, is instead of God being the center of the universe, subjectivity can create what is in the world and the universe.

If we believe it, it will happen.

You know, people pray to God, Please God, let there be a miracle.

Now we can do it all with ourselves.

And I think it's very interesting that you mentioned COVID because COVID only highlighted the age of uncertainty that we live in and the way we are so out of control with many aspects of the environment, including our physical environment.

And so, you know, manifesting comes in, you know, it reassures, it shores up.

You know, if we can do this all with our subjectivity and selves, then we are somehow secure actually in a world that we're far from secure.

I mean, thanks.

I mean, this makes me think about the wider

context as you've sort of begun to touch on us to kind of the social and the cultural reasons for the popularity of manifesting and why we might turn to that.

And I was thinking of the work done and research into the self-help industry and how this links to a kind of neoliberal philosophy, if you like, of reliance on the self and the whole notion of resilience

and the discourses of well-being, resilience, which in themselves, of course, are no bad things and we all need emotional well-being and resilience.

But often that is then linked to these sort of self-help measures, which we, you know, we can all do.

You can buy a book.

It's very seductive.

And it's

It's a kind of philosophy and an ideology that's there in government.

If you can't get a job, if the world's difficult, this is down to you and you need to be more positive.

So it's about kind of positive thinking.

It's all that ideology of positive thinking.

And manifesting is one aspect of that, for sure.

I do remember actually myself.

It sounds very similar to what we used to do years ago in terms of visualisation and, no, it's all quite, it was quite, and I remember before exams.

thinking, my God, I'm being really scared.

And then going into a kind of, as we waited in the corridor, chanting inwardly, I can do this and imagining myself with the first class to see before I went in to write some, absolutely.

I mean, there's something definitely to it.

There's a value.

in working to believe in oneself and putting your focus into getting what you want to achieve and develop.

I suppose the problem is, if we think about it as the compliance of the universe with our desires and wishes, which then does return us to wish fulfillment and magical thinking.

And the truth is,

what does happen in life is adversity.

Some things we can't control.

And there's a lot of things we can learn from adversity and loss of control.

Like, you know, you learn things about yourself, you learn about reality, you learn about how to look at things in a different way.

And we learn not only from positive things happening, but from painful things happening.

And we learn

by dealings with loss, dealing with psychic pain.

We develop that way.

And I suppose what's worrying about this, it's the overemphasis on positivity and the overemphasis on the harmonizing with the subjective will, if you like.

But I think there's many things about what I'd like to call the prevalent zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.

Yeah.

And how that has really set the groundwork for manifesting.

Yeah.

You know, as you absolutely rightly said, you know, this this focus on individualization, this focus on the self, you know, we don't focus on the community and others.

We it's all about me, lonely me.

What am I going to do?

You know,

Sorry, yes.

This is linked to, I'm just thinking, I mean, you and I, when we, in our intellectual training in history, I don't know about you, but I mean, Christopher Lash's The Culture of Narcissism was a key text and talks about many of these ideas when he said that, you know, Oedipus was a myth.

that had it as a moment and now it's all about narcissus and that and we'd set questions for students about the narcissistic personality and so on and look at conditions in society and at that time I remember Lash was

talking about America the book came out actually I think 1979 and I remember I remember my tutor saying well that's America it'll never happen here but actually look look what's happened here and what happens in America swiftly follows and I think you know the American dream is what manifesting is linked to and it is the idea

that, you know, we can get what we want if we try hard enough.

And it doesn't look at the fact there's social adversity or inequality.

That's not addressed.

But the American dream believes in this, you know, unabiding truth that you can get there.

Yes.

And I think there's also something that I mean, also that something that lashed

referred to and which has since been taken up and we've all discussed it at length is this idea of therapy culture and that while there is potential for positive aspects of therapy culture that society borrows from

the kind of culture of psychotherapy in terms of its emphasis on the importance of empathy, nurturing and so on.

But also as we've been discussing, it can also be about me and me and so on.

And it's quite a superficial reading of what therapy is about.

and that manifesting is linked to that.

And I mean, we can all do it.

You can buy a book or you can sit alone in a room and it's something you can do.

And also it's cheap.

I mean, you don't have to pay a shrink.

You don't have to commit to years of therapy or anything like that.

And so it is something that you can imagine lots of people are attracted to for that reason.

And you can sit there and imagine getting in touch with the universe.

and so on.

And it's immensely popular for that reason, I'd think.

Yeah.

In psychological terms, I'd be interested to hear.

I mean, I just, if you don't mind, if I could go back a bit about the Zeitgeist, because I want to say quite a few things.

I mean, I think everything that you've been saying, the culture of narcissism,

the growth of consumerism, the self-promotion culture, the self-help culture.

This is all very related.

It's also, you know, the age of the birth of theories of mind, theories of psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, but getting increasingly popular, which says, you know, if you cognitive to

cognitively believe in something, it can change your reality.

Not quite the same, but you know, there's that notion there of the power of the mind.

There are these other psychologies that have been emerging.

You know, there's neurolinguistics that very much is there and has the idea that, you know, the brain thought creates reality.

And there is the growth psychologist.

You know, I'm thinking I don't know whether this is, you know, a bit old fashioned, but Tony Robbins, you know, you can do it if you believe in it.

Paul McKenna, you know, you can overcome all forms of adversity with training the mind.

And there's a guy called Joe Dispenser who claims you can cure cancer.

with manifesting.

Now, obviously, you know, some people that have cancer may try such methods, but it's the all abiding absolute certainty of the possibility of controlling things outside ourselves with the mind that starts to tip us a little bit too far, you know, along the line.

But finally, sorry, I just wanted to say about the postmodernity and the sort of destruction of a belief in religion, reason and science.

And so there's very little to hang on to.

And then the pseudo sciences come in where you can claim now, you know, on social media that the world is flat or that, you know, evolution is, you know, extinct as a notion.

Just because now science is no longer seen as a ground.

for things.

And of course, manifesting does assert that laws of attraction is an absolute science.

People say it's a pseudoscience, but whatever.

It is part of this shift in, you know, grounding ourselves in what we used to consider a science and religion that used to give us this security.

Now it's in place for many of us.

So sort of questioning of what we called the old grand narratives that Lyotard talked about, the big stories by which we made sense of our lives.

And it's sometimes said, well, it's said that we live in a post-truth world, that it's there with media that enables this.

So the kind of technologies now provide another condition for this to happen.

you know, manifesting one's hopes and dreams is, becomes dominant in that, popular in that context.

I'm just, I mean, you mentioned it as a pseudoscience that people claim, all sorts of scientific, but you also mentioned the kind neuro,

linguistics and psychology.

I wonder if you want to say a bit about that before we turn to a kind of psychoanalytic understanding of what's happening.

Well, I think I just wanted to maybe say, you know, the underlying presupposition, I think, by the idea that the subject with its mind or brain

has so much power to create and control reality, that it is a kind of return to subjective idealism.

And it doesn't allow us to look at some of the fears and anxieties that underlie why we are so engaged with

wanting to have these types of solutions.

And of course, psychoanalysis and psychology, well, psychoanalytic psychology, I mean, psychoanalytic thinking does engage with those anxieties and insecurities and indeed believes it's very important to do so.

I mean, how would

You know, one wants, you know, more the impulse to have some sense of agency and control over one's life.

The idea of manifesting is about banishing negative thoughts and being more positive in the world.

So is there an equivalent or, I mean, how would psychoanalysis approach this kind of impulse and how would it answer this need?

Well, I think one answer for me lies in looking more less at the self on us in isolation and looking more at the importance of relationships and others as ways of improving how we feel and what helps us feel purposeful and meaningfully engaged with ourselves and the world.

And I think that, you know, psychoanalysis would look at how this very much relates to a disturbance and difficulty with the internalization of what Klein might call the good object, what Heinz Kohut, a self-psychologist, might call the self-object.

what attachment and relational analysts may call, you know, the attachment figure.

And it very much relates to how we felt when we were young, if we were loved and believed in, and how that relates to our own internalization of so-called self-love and self-belief.

And obviously, if we can

look at those issues and understand them and work on them, then we can help ourselves have more of a sense of self-value.

Because I don't think, and I'm going to show you, or not show you, but I'm going to talk about this, that success, achievement is always the answer to problems with self-value.

And I do think I mean, Winnicott talks a lot about mirror and, you know, we talked about the culture of narcissism.

Yeah.

And there is many things to be said about a culture now that has disorders of the self as one of its main issues.

I mean, you know, personality disorders, narcissistic disorders, disorders of the self coming to the clinic because we are suffering.

from massive issues around crises in the self, our sense of self-esteem.

But I suppose my answer is learning to grow an inner sense of resource through self-understanding, through developing our sense of value in ourselves in relation

to others and not just the self and improving capacities for intimacy.

I mean, I'm thinking also as you're talking about Winnicott and hope and transition, the potential space.

and a kind of and trusting to a kind of sense of as ifness that you know hope is about trusting if you like and I and I wonder if there are similarities with the ideas of manifesting that the incense you know trusting to the universe a kind of hoping and a wish and a trust that things will be good and that you can that things will be okay as the mother says to the baby

You know, it's all going to be okay.

And people that do have a greater security of attachment do have a more abiding belief that things will be okay and that if mistakes do happen and tragedies happen and so on, that one will survive and survive well.

Yes, in terms of kind of psychoanalytic readings of manifesting then, we've touched on Cohut and Winnicott and Attach

theory I mean one of the what people say is that you know psychoanalysis you know has an underlying pessimism you know to it but you know learning to live with your normal unhappiness and so on you know if you're a Lacanian I'm paraphrasing you know it's all about learning to accept lack

Klein living with conflict, internal conflict and ambivalence and so on.

But I'm not a union specialist at all, but I know that from a union perspective, my union analysts, friends would say, well, that's all about living with uncertainty, but also embracing transformation.

And I guess that's the trick, isn't it, is not

to fantasize just about certainty and happiness, but to think about change and transformation and manage uncertainty at the same time.

It's this balance.

And I wonder, you know, with psychoanalytic understandings, how we might

kind of think about that just a bit more?

Well, I think that what you said is right, that it is about change and development and developing a belief in oneself.

But sometimes we can't be open properly to develop that belief unless we understand

you know, why we can't go along with the transformation or how we can't go along with the transformation.

You know, where is this deep feeling of not believing in oneself coming from that stops one enjoying one's successes and

It can be that manifesting can encourage us to think we can become this perfect ideal as if the ego could unite with becoming an absolutely perfect ideal.

And maybe ideal isn't going to be the solution.

And so it's actually enjoying that you're not having to be an ideal, as Winnicott would say, the good enough.

and actually doing this podcast today, we've had to believe in order to manifest and do it, that we are just able to be okay, good enough.

If we're too into our own self-realization, we're not going to get off the ground.

I mean, one of the things that comes to mind is that...

These don't take place in a social and cultural vacuum.

There's also the social and the cultural and political in that too, in terms of internalizing these kind of negative stereotypes and what have you, which get tied, bound up with the kind of psychological and emotional complexities of our upbringing.

Well, absolutely.

I mean, you know, you know,

having, you know, being culturally different and, you know, I'm a Jew and, you know, I've experienced that cultural difference and it not being understood and how that feeds in because it's not only, of course, what happens in the family, it's, you know, how other people relate to us and understanding and freeing ourselves from that.

And so

I mean, I think we both probably, you know, both feel that there's some point to manifesting.

And in a sense, we do it all the time.

We've done it for this podcast today.

I just suppose it's about also learning in other ways from experience.

And it's not only about the positivity and harmonizing with our environments.

It's also learning through the

fizzes with the environment.

But I mean, I suppose I would put emphasis on not having so much focus on looking for ourselves all the time.

And I'm thinking, for example, on dating sites, you know, people say I'm looking for a like minded person.

someone who has the same interests.

And I think it's a sort of interesting way of turning that in the other direction and sort of thinking, I'm looking for something different to myself.

I'm interested in, you know, being open and curious about ways that things that don't align with my beliefs and values.

And how can I learn from that and how can I learn from the differences

in others to myself.

So I guess, you know, if we start to wrap up now, the messages I'm getting here or the kind of themes we've covered is the importance of being good enough and accepting that and so on without kind of feeling one's got to be perfect, which is often

the kind of search for perfection which lies behind manifesting, not always, but it's there.

And that perfection is also shaped by politics, culture, society, and one's upbringing.

So it's this kind of messy psychosocial kind of mix there.

And that manifesting is also sort of symptomatic of a kind of

individualized society where it's all down to the individual and we forget about the importance of relationships and the way in which we are shaped and constituted by our relationships with others.

And it doesn't have to just be down to us to manifest our future.

And while ambition is good and, you know, hoping and thinking about good things,

and for some groups really important who've been oppressed and I'm thinking here of women who've suffered imposter syndrome and it's very positive to be thinking you know I can do this and I can do that but it can also

you know, can be detrimental to the self.

And it's a way of kind of avoiding the kind of challenges, excitement, pitfalls and pleasures of relationships and a different way of growing and developing.

Because it's not only relationships, it's also, you know, things in the world that we may not be able to command and fully understand and be always, you know,

interested in finding out more.

And it's okay actually not to know and to feel a bit uncertain.

And indeed, it's quite honest.

Oh, look, thank you, Nicola, for sharing your ideas of having this conversation and sharing with us your expertise, considerable expertise in this area.

I'm very, very grateful to you and thanks everybody else for listening.

Thank you to Callum Blades, our digital media producer here who's been recording this and so on.

And thank you, Callum, and look forward to the next podcast.

Thank you very much.

Thanks.

Goodbye.

Welcome to the Postscript segment of Psycho Cultural.

This is a space for our speakers to reflect on the experience of doing the podcast

and provides an opportunity to add any thoughts and insights they might have missed during the main discussion.

So hi, Nicola.

So how did you find that?

How was it?

Well, I think there were some hiccups.

But I kind of feel that one of the main areas that I didn't really address was, what are the possible so-called therapeutic alternatives to manifesting?

Have we got any?

And I really do think, you know, starting up with the postscript, as with footnotes, sometimes that can be a very significant part of a work.

And I'm thinking of Freud's Dora, when in his postscript he starts talking about the transference relationship.

And, you know, that's really a unique, refreshing start to something.

In the podcast, you ask me, you know, what is an alternative to manifesting?

And certainly in my clinical practice, patients have complained that manifesting hasn't worked.

They still feel stuck.

You know, the self-doubt hasn't budged.

And I suggest that manifesting could be seen

To mask over negative states of mind with a kind.

of omnipotent defence that I've described that is even a form of another word for another podcast can be toxic positivity.

Very good.

Yeah, because instead of covering over feelings of love and of low self-esteem, appropriate slip there, it's important to face feelings and even learn from them.

There are varying psychoanalytic perspectives on negative feelings about the self and how they are formed.

From a renowned attachment researcher, Alan Schruth, he notes that research outstandingly shows that securely attached persons have high self-esteem.

This self belief, as I've talked about, all abiding belief that it's all going to be okay in the end and I can do it.

And I also referred in the podcast to an internal object.

Now, we have often in social media the idea you have to love yourself.

You know, it's a sort of banded around a lot.

However, in order to love yourself, it's essential to have had the experience of being loved by another.

It's only by being loved and valued by someone else, originally our

you know, early attachment caretakers, that we can then internalize the self-love and self-value.

I have found with patients suffering from low self-esteem, the need to explore the early disturbances, the very specific perturbations in the emotional connection between child and parent, what Ballant calls the basic fault, you know, Winnicott's problems of mirroring,

and disturbances in the attachment relationship, sort of to understand these problems.

If negative feelings fail to be acknowledged, we project and enact them on others.

You know, we often can produce a facade of confidence.

We put that on in a public place, but in intimate relationships or in a personal analysis behind closed doors, so to speak, projections happen.

For example, the therapist can be devalued, which has happened to me a number of times in my life.

You are inadequate, not me.

To change feelings, they need to be owned.

and which is kind of the opposite of manifesting.

You kind of go along with the low feeling.

You kind of tolerate it and even embrace it, thinking of beyond's idea there.

Going with the vulnerability, I would say, is a strength.

Processing feelings, you know, the idea of promising primitive feelings about the self into an articulated state, again, thinking of beyond,

beyond, which involves understanding the complex attachment history and intergenerational context whereby perturbances in relations have led to disturbances in the self.

And finally, when we're immersed in feeling states, we cannot see outside them.

The aim of therapy is insight.

You know, this involves an ability to look at oneself from another perspective, sort of inside the feeling, but also taking a stance kind of from without of the self, a kind of third perspective.

And I'm thinking of Thomas Ogson's analytic third, but I'm also thinking of the reflective function, you know, what we've talked about in modern day practice, even in the National Health Service.

this as mentalizing.

So like I'm proposing an alternative to manifesting where there's a therapeutic journey which involves self-understanding, reflection, and a transformation of all those, of that to reach the potential of the self.

It's a slightly different stance, but that's what I like to say.

Well, I hope that you can promote that a bit more.

And people hopefully will have heard this on the podcast.

And I think that's really, really interesting.

And I'm glad you've had the opportunity actually to say that and to outline that theory, which is really interesting.

And look, thank you, Nicola.

I think we've got to wind up now.

And yeah, take care and, you know,

keep manifesting everyone.

But in the way that Nicholas says.

All right then, bye bye.