How the Ancient Greeks Invented Eye Movement Desensitizing and Reprocessing to Deal with Trauma

EMDR—eye movement desensitizing and reprocessing—is one of the stranger psychological treatments. But there is good evidence that it helps people who have been through traumatic experiences. About this, let me draw on the Angus Fletcher’s fascinating March 24, 2021 Wall Street Journal article “The Cathartic Technology of Greek Tragedy,” which in turn draws on his new book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. Unless noted otherwise, all quotations here are from “The Cathartic Technology of Greek Tragedy.” Angus writes:

… it can help to sweep our eyes from side to side while we mentally review the trauma. This curious fact was stumbled upon by researcher Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s, and at the time it appeared so random, even magical, that it was regarded warily as a drift into pseudoscience. But recent studies on mice have suggested that side-to-side eye movement may stimulate a small region of our brain called the superior colliculus-mediodorsal thalamus circuit, which is involved in fear attenuation. Eye movement has proved effective enough in clinical trials to produce its own trauma therapy—eye movement desensitizing and reprocessing (EMDR)—that has been formally recommended by the American Psychiatric Association and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Intriguingly, the Ancient Greeks guessed this. (The Ancient Greeks had to deal with plenty of battle trauma from war.) “Catharsis” is the purging of fear that was supposed to come from tragedy. But the Greek tragedies didn’t just depict traumatic events, they moved the audiences eyes from side to side during the play:

… choral chants such as the ones found in Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon,” from 458 BCE: “The law of our world is pain, the scar that teaches the hardness of days and leaves its mark in every heart.” …

… Like EMDR, the play’s chorus delivered that prompt in a dynamic performance that shifted the eyes left and right.

When Greek tragedies are performed now in a way that moves the audience’s eyes side to side, they help with post-traumatic stress disorder:

Performances of “Agamemnon” and other Greek tragedies have been staged for combat veterans by initiatives such as Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War Productions and Peter Meineck’s Aquila Theatre Company, which places particular emphasis on the side-to-side movement incorporated into EMDR. These performances led the veterans to self-report a decrease in feelings of isolation, hypervigilance and other symptoms of post-traumatic fear.

Angus identifies one other aspect of some Greek tragedies that can help salve post-traumatic stress disorder: letting the audience know things the character doesn’t know. This puts them in a position of wishing they could help someone else rather than simply being absorbed in their own troubles:

This neural experience of supporting Oedipus in his time of need is deeply therapeutic. When we discover our ability to assist others through their trauma, we increase our confidence that we can cope with trauma ourselves.

Despite the name, EMDR isn’t always done with eye movement. Sometimes it is done with tappers near someones legs that alternately tap on the right side and then the left. As the Wikipedia article “Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing” currently says:

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of psychotherapy developed by Francine Shapiro starting in 1988 in which the person being treated is asked to recall distressing images; the therapist then directs the patient in one type of bilateral stimulation, such as side-to-side eye rapid movement or hand tapping.

Many standard treatments in psychiatry don’t work very well. It is great to have a treatment as safe as EMDR that works so well. Another example of a psychiatric treatment that seems to work surprisingly well is psychedelics or ketamine for people who are depressed or are thinking about suicide. See “Hope in Returning to the Road Not Taken in Psychiatry.” (My son Spencer committed suicide despite being under the care of a psychiatrist and having spent time in the psyche ward at a University of Michigan hospital. I wonder if psychedelics of ketamine could have helped him. See “The Shards of My Heart” on this trauma for us.)

Freud famously said “much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” That is certainly true. And for those who are not in terrible shape, are not diagnosible with a psychiatric malady, but are suffering from “common unhappiness,” a life coach can be immensely helpful. I have links to some posts about that below.

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