GREGORY BATESON AND

A LANGUAGE FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY

by

Alexander Blount, Ed.D.

c. 1976

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. THE NEED FOR A LANGUAGE............................................................................ 3

II. GREGORY BATESON AND

THE BEGINNINGS OF A LANGUAGE............................................................... 11

A. Context....................................................................................................... 11

B. Logical Types.............................................................................................. 15

C. Categories of Learning and Communication.................................................. 20

D. Pathology.................................................................................................... 30

E. Psychotherapy............................................................................................. 36

III. FREUD'S PSYCHOANALYSIS: PARALLELS AND PARADOXES................... 44

IV. FREUD, BINSWANGER AND LEARNING III.................................................... 61

V. THE LANGUAGE AND OTHER THERAPIES..................................................... 76

A. Gestalt Therapy........................................................................................... 77

B. Relationship Therapy................................................................................... 82

C. Direct Analysis............................................................................................ 88

D. Network Therapy........................................................................................ 93

VI. SUMMARY AND CLOSING REMARKS.......................................................... 100

THE NEED FOR A LANGUAGE

One of the testimonies to the importance of psychotherapy to Western people's understanding of themselves and their possible ways of being is the great breadth of interest in it and the universal lack of consensus on almost any aspect of the process one might want to consider. Theories, methodologies, and schools of therapy continue to proliferate. People with an incredibly wide diversity of formal training consider the practice of psychotherapy a logical fruitful way of bringing their training to bear on the world around them.

One would think that as different therapies were tried and compared, ways that were better would have come to be generally agreed upon and results would have become more assured and predictable. Diagnosis would become, in this way of understanding, ever more accurate and finely matched to an appropriate method of treatment. This has not been the case. As new therapies, theories, and terminologies have arisen, it has been the people who had hoped for a refinement and elimination of theories, leading to the identification of the best methods, yielding predictable and demonstrable results, who have been most disappointed and critical of psychotherapy as it was being practiced. In the last twenty years or so many articles have called the effectiveness of psychotherapy severely into question. (92, 186, 98)

Unfortunately the studies which are most emphatic in their assertion that psychotherapy is ineffective seem generally to be the studies most limited to the “effective” vs. “ineffective” dichotomy. When a field with the extended history, the multitude of formal approaches and the myriad of personal therapeutic styles which are incorporated under the term “psychotherapy” is reduced to a single dichotomy, it is obvious that most of the complexities of the experience involved must be screened out by the language used.

Psychotherapists as well as their critics tend to be grounded in a faith in science. Even though they may be successful in terms of relieving the suffering of their patients, most therapists are uneasy when they cannot say why they are successful in “provable” scientific language. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, one of the most successful (in the terms used above) and influential therapists of recent times, in agreeing with Zilboorg that one is unable to say satisfactorily why one is successful puts her hope in science to provide the explanatory system which would make her successes repeatable by others. She says that, “our aim is to replace intuition with understanding, and to convert the intuitive truths with which all psychotherapy works by necessity, into scientific truths, so that they may become public property . . . ready to be used, tested, questioned, probed, and experimented with by anyone else who is interested in science.” (244)

There are two fundamental problems with the approach Fromm-Reichmann would like to be able to follow. One is the assumption that there is knowledge to be had which, when properly categorized and specified, can be known and used equally by anyone else who is interested in science. With the proper formulations, supposedly, one can have a body of “true” knowledge which allows the knowers to be interchangeable. This separating of knowledge from the knower isolates a part of an interdependent process, and is then by its nature incomplete, a skewed picture of what is in fact a larger whole. This is the subject/object separation. It is an approach which fosters, for example, the investigation of “consciousness” rather than “consciousness of . . .”. Consciousness is not a “thing”. It is a process in which there is always one who is conscious and “something” of which one is conscious. Everywhere the scientific approach makes “things” where there are only processes. Generally this involves subdividing into bits which can be studied, “isolating variables”.

In the practice of isolating variables is the second problem of the “scientific” approach in the behavioral sciences. The application of this method seems to let the essence of an interaction or process slip through its methodological fingers.

It is almost axiomatic in psychotherapy research that those data which can be most reliably quantified seem least significant for the comprehension of the process; while those aspects of the treatment which clinicians would consider crucial are generally not accessible to measurement and yield low reliability among observers. (4)

While there is a movement in the sciences back to studying whole entities as processes, this approach which promises so much for our understanding is still relatively new and has had little impact on the mainstream of the behavioral sciences. Barry Commoner, a noted biologist, describes clearly the need for holistic ways of seeing.

If we consider all the forms of matter that we know about, only in regard to narrow spectrum [nuclear physics] is there a possibility of what might be called the “atomistic approximation” succeeding. Everything else is necessarily holistic, so that what has appeared to be a universal basic approach to science since the Greeks--atomism--is really a special case, which only worked where it has worked and is not going to work anywhere else, up or down. It’s a narrow window, a special case; but, because of the enormous consequences of understanding the atom, it has misled everyone into believing that atomism is synonymous with science. I think this is the great evil of Western science today. (93)

From a beginning with whole processes one is able to, and should, work toward and understanding of component parts. The minute is as important as ever. However, whenever one is dealing with systems (which, as we shall see, is most of the time), the whole is more than, and different from the sum of its parts. One cannot build from an understanding of the small to an adequate description of the large though this is what is usually attempted in research on psychotherapy.

Though the people trying to explain psychotherapeutic change “scientifically” have had little success, that does not mean that changes which is helpful to a client does not occur or that it occurs randomly. Some therapists, in all probability, are better for particular clients than others. Some clients are more likely to improve than others. Something certainly happens for some people (though change may in some cases be more significant for the therapist than for the client). (122) One is, however, looking in the wrong way when one seeks to correlate client gain with the school of psychotherapy adhered to be the therapist. (99)

There are many theories of psychotherapy, but is impressive how often the therapist’s technique is more an expression of his personality than an adherence to any particular school of thought. Various studies have established that competent psychotherapists of different schools agree more closely with each other regarding the most important elements in therapy than do not-as-competent therapists belonging to the same theoretic school. In addition, the competent therapists, regardless of their theoretic persuasion, agree more closely with the patient’s appraisal of the important elements in his therapy than do the not-as-competent therapists. The patients who feel they have undergone a significant change as a result of psychotherapy uniformly place their response to the therapists ahead of “insight.” (173)

We are left here in a very unscientific position. We can say that there are some elements of therapy more important than others. At the same time no specific technique can be prescribed as most successful, therapists seem to use a technique which is uniquely a product of their own personalities.

In reporting on an extensive study of two groups of therapists, one with a seventy-five percent improvement rate and one with a twenty-seven per cent improvement rate in their work with schizophrenic people, Whitehorne says the difference in effectiveness between the two groups seemed to be attributable to:

...the differences found among physicians in the extent to which they were able to approach their patient’s problems in a personal way, gain a trusted, confidential relationship and participate in an active personal way in the patient’s reorientation to personal relationships. Techniques of passive permissiveness or efforts to develop insight by interpretation appear to have much less therapeutic value. (231)

A therapist has to “participate in an active personal way.” He has to “invest” personally in the therapeutic process.

There is evidence that this same sort of investment is required, at some level, of the patient. In a study restricted to factors “in” the patient which influenced their continuing in psychotherapy in an outpatient clinic in Chicago, Heine and Trosman had interesting results. The presenting complaint (whether it was emotional or somatic) and the degree of conviction on the part of the patient that treatment would be helpful proved not to be significant as factors in whether or not they continued in psychotherapy beyond a very brief time. The significant factors proved to be the “active collaboration” in the therapeutic process by the patient as opposed to “passive cooperation,” and whether the patient was seeking “help in changing behavior” or simply expecting medicine or diagnostic information.

Though we can say that “active investment” on the part of both people in individual psychotherapy (therapist and patient) is a very important element in a helpful therapy, and that in such therapy there will be substantial agreement between the therapist and patient on what are the important elements of the therapy, we have not begun to say how any element in the therapy is productive of helpful change.

In fact the language commonly used to talk about psychotherapy, and therefore that which is available for naturalistic (non-quantitative) research, is riddled, according to Gregory Bateson, with:

...a number of imperfectly defined explanatory notions which are commonly used in the behavioral sciences-- “ego,” “anxiety,” “instinct,” “purpose,” “mind,” “self,” “fixed action pattern,” “intelligence,” “stupidity,” “maturity,” and the like. For the sake of politeness, I call these “heuristic” concepts; but, in truth, most of them are so loosely derived and so mutually irrelevant that they mix together to make a sort of conceptual fog which does much to delay the progress of science. (64)

Given the lack of specificity of “process oriented” language and the general inadequacy of the usual atomistic (reductionist) scientific approaches, it is no wonder that a therapist and a patient find themselves in the situation which Bateson describes so well:

The patient and the therapist are both virtually unable to tell you what happened that led to psychotherapeutic change. . . . I do not know of any school of psychotherapy that, as yet, has enough language for talking about these levels to even attempt to give insight at these levels. (30)

We need a language which can speak rigorously about the whole of the process of psychotherapy, not just about what is happening “in” the patient or what is done by the therapist. In order to accomplish this goal a language and the concomitant way of understanding must be able to deal with the system of therapist-patient, with that in the process which is more than the sum of the parts.

In the work of Gregory Bateson, I believe, there is a way of thinking about phenomena which could allow for the development of a language which could speak rigorously about the process of psychotherapy in a holistic way. Since Bateson himself has never attempted such a project in a systematic fashion, it will be the work of this study to develop such a language.

The language when developed should be able to express coherently, in the same general set of understandings and terms, all the phenomena surrounding a field as general as “psychotherapy.” While it may not offer a theory in all areas adequate to the phenomena, it should allow one to discuss and understand, and therefore do further work in, areas which up to now have had very different approaches and terminologies. Examples of the phenomena which should be accessible to the language are: human learning, human development, families, psychopathology, bits of interaction (usually called “stimulus,” “response,” and “reinforcement”), profound inter-relating (the “I-thou relationship”), communication generally, and “intra-psychic” processes.

A language is an approach to phenomena which embodies in itself a way of sorting and assigning meaning, an epistemology. A change in language, in epistemology, does not necessarily imply a change in behavior (as is usually understood). In this case, it does not necessarily imply that a new form of psychotherapy will result from using a new language to understand this process. However, a change in ways of understanding does imply a change in possibilities. In a different epistemological context, the evolution of psychotherapy as a formal interactive process will, in all likelihood, be modified. So, while a “Batesonian” language does not imply a “Batesonian therapy”, it is probable that if many therapists began to think about therapy as a whole and to perceive the bits of therapeutic interaction in Batesonian terms, the therapy which they practiced would gradually modify (evolve) in the direction of more fully and clearly embodying these understandings. As we will see over and over in the course of the study, basic premises involved in how one understands interactions, the context of meanings or “punctuations” in which an interaction occurs, tend to be self-validating. We will also see that the more one’s abstract epistemological premises are adequate to the complexity of the phenomena under consideration, the more one is able to give form and meaning to aspects of the phenomena which otherwise would seem random and of no consequence.

Our goal, then, is to develop a language which can give expression in a coherent form to a greater complexity of aspects of the psychotherapeutic process than are presently available to the languages commonly used. It should be remembered in reading this work that a language is a different sort of an enterprise than a specific theory or experiment. It cannot be stated in any short compact form which can then be discussed or proved. It exists only in its use, and that is the only way it can be learned. In the title of the next chapter, the term “beginnings” is meant to imply that the language is in the process of development and explication throughout the entire work. Where the reader encounters a part that seems unclear or that does not conform immediately to his experience, he is asked to continue reading. The point will, in all likelihood, be discussed again in a different context later in the work. Through the use of language in several different contexts, it is hoped that this study will enable the reader to utilize the language in the contexts of his own experience.

Perhaps a brief description of the form which the study as a whole will take will better prepare the reader for his encounter with our language. The study will have the chapters listed below. In the explanation of each of the succeeding chapters should be apparent the scope, methodology and limitations of the work.

GREGORY BATESON AND THE BEGINNINGS OF A LANGUAGE

In this section of the paper the attempt will be made to present Bateson’s thought as it has developed over the years so that the reader will experience the formal elegance inherent in the whole as well as coming to understand concepts which are the particulars. The individual concepts will be developed as fully as possible using some of the different ways of approaching them and different language in which they have been couched at different points in Bateson’s career. Only when ideas have been explained and have been set forth in their interrelationship which makes for the coherence of a language or approach will the study attempt to come back to any sort of a shorthand or a set of terms which can be taken conveniently along when talking about other people’s thought or therapy.

Though several different ways of talking about a concept used by Bateson at different times may be offered, the general approach to his thought will not be historical. Only when an account of the different forms that a theory or concept took over the years seems to be the best way to show the present concept in its full resonance will such an account be undertaken. The history of the double bind theory in its transformation from “binder versus victim” to “schizophrenic (i.e., bound) family” will be such a case.

Though much of this section will be quite abstract, dealing with the orderedness of contexts, the nature of difference, and so forth, there will also be discussion of the phenomena out of which these patterns are drawn. Hopefully, the language which is developed will be demonstrably convenient when speaking about therapy, families, and the like.

FREUD’S PSYCHOANALYSIS: PARALLELS AND PARADOXES

There is a remarkable correspondence between the ordered levels of the contexts of learning which Bateson talks about and the levels of intra-psychic process which Freud described. The study will show that using Bateson’s way of thought, much of Freud’s work becomes available and useful from an “information theory” or “cybernetic” point of view. Freudian concepts such as “transference, “ “primary process,” and “unconscious” are completely at home in a Batesonian language, though the processes which they describe are thought about in ways very different from Freud’s. Many of Freud’s descriptions of his technique, such as his early descriptions of free association, the treatment of compulsives and the evolution of his approach to transference exhibit the formal characteristics described by Bateson and his colleagues as the “therapeutic double bind.”

In working as fully and concretely as possible with a language as broad and rich as that of Freud, the application of Bateson’s language can be demonstrated and refined.

FREUD, BINSWANGER, AND LEARNING III

In his article, “Freud’s Conception of Man in the Light of Anthropology,” Ludwig Binswanger puts forward an excellent assessment of Freud’s work from the point of view of an existentialist. While giving Freud great respect for illuminating the patterns of functioning of human beings, Binswanger finds Freud’s basic concept of people as “Homo Natura”, as organism, fails to take into account people in their existential being. The being who can say “my organism,” “my history,” “my growth” is a being unrepresented in Freudian thought, according to Binswanger.

Binswanger’s argument, when followed in a much more careful way than the sketch presented here, is quite forceful. In the terms of this paper, he says that Freud’s language cannot deal adequately with certain human experiences. If, in the parts of the study up to this point, the parallel between Bateson’s language and Freud’s has been convincingly drawn, it seems likely that some examination or comparison of Bateson with Binswanger will be in order.

This comparison will involve an attempt to come to a clear understanding and statement of Bateson’s concept of Learning III. In the context of the development of Bateson’s thought and the outlining of Binswanger’s understanding of how a language must deal with “Homo existentialis”, Learning III will, hopefully, be understandable. The concept of Learning III will enable us in our languague to discuss a given therapy’s approach to the most fundamental aspects of human existence.

THE LANGUAGE AND OTHER THERAPIES

By this point in the study, the language will have been set out in its full scope and resonance. This chapter will involve using the language to talk about other therapies. The “how” of cure in such therapies as Network Therapy, and the therapies of Jessie Taft, Fritz Perls and John Rosen will be discussed in Bateson’s terms. This should make systems whose terminologies and emphases seem hardly to intersect, available for easy comparison as to what they are attempting to accomplish and how helpful change using each approach is effected. It is for this purpose that the study is undertaken and the language constructed.

SUMMARY AND CLOSING REMARKS

This section will attempt to knit together the loose ends left in the study up to this point.

A brief summary of the language as it has been developed will be offered to give the reader a better sense of the unity and form of the work as a whole. Finally, we will very briefly discuss the relation of the language to the act of writing this thesis. This will offer a final reminder of the inter-active nature of all the processes touched upon in this work including the writing of the study itself.

GREGORY BATESON AND THE BEGINNINGS OF A LANGUAGE

In this chapter we will attempt to develop the language of this study and give the reader an initial sense of its usefulness. We will begin by trying to make a connection between the language and the experience of the reader. We must begin on common ground. We then hope to show that the connection we have chosen to make with the reader’s experience and the subsequent development of our way of describing experience is neither capricious nor arbitrary. By discussing the basic form of experiencing and learning we hope to show that the language we want to use embodies this same basic form. The two are isomorphic, to use a term which will be used several times in this work. As we develop our language into more rigorous clarity, the same clarity should be available for describing human experiencing and learning. We will use the mathematical theory of Logical Types to help give clarity to our language, and then we will try to apply the theory to human learning. In both of these processes we will be retracing the steps of Bateson. The last two sections of this chapter will use the description of human learning we develop to talk about how this process can go awry (pathology) and what can be done about it (therapy). It is the language for discussing psychotherapy toward which we are building. Hopefully, the steps we take in working toward this goal will ultimately prove themselves necessary, helping the reader to have a fuller sense of the size and complexity of the task we are undertaking.

In all this task, we will be using the work of Gregory Bateson. While some of the specific points in this chapter are original to the present author, the thinking is so deeply rooted in Bateson’s thought that separating the original from paraphrase of Bateson has become impossible. Only the organization of the chapter as a whole and some of the examples of various points are clearly original. The additions and refinements of the language in subsequent chapters will to a much greater degree be the work of the present author. Unfortunately, any confusion or unnecessary complexity involved in our language and its use is original with the present author and cannot be attributed to Bateson.

Having set out the plan for this chapter and our debt to Bateson, we will begin in our attempt to establish a meeting place between our language and the experience of the reader.

CONTEXT

A certain mother habitually rewards her small son with ice cream after he eats his spinach. What additional information would you need to be able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate spinach; b. Love or hate ice cream, or c. Love or hate Mother? (65)

This is an example Bateson uses to convey the importance of the notion of context. It is, hopefully, a good entry point into his way of thinking, a way of thinking by no means unique to him, but which is in his work presented through a range of subjects and with a clarity and depth which is truly unique.

Take a moment with the example above. Consider what information or what kinds of information you would need to make the predictions involved.

The question is explosive in its implication. Each bit of information one gets increases one’s sense of how much information is needed. Consider the change in the meaning of the situation any one of the following pieces of information would effect: The child is diabetic and ice cream is dangerous. The expense of ice cream greatly taxes the family budget. The mother learned her eating habits in exactly the same or a very different way. The father considers this bribing the child. The other children don’t get ice cream for eating spinach. The other children get ice cream and cake while this child only gets ice cream. The father raises spinach for a living.

Each possibility completely modifies the situation and each begs further clarification and modification. The contextual information one would need to confidently predict the outcomes in question is potentially infinite. Knowing only what one knows in the example, one knows nothing. Or, more properly, without the context, what one knows has no meaning. It has no meaning to an observer. This point must always be understood in talking of meaning. Meaning is always perceived meaning. Information is only information to a perceiving entity. Differences only makes a difference when it is some sense (or by some sense) perceived.

Explanation involving context is always hierarchical. Every context has a context. The unit of meaning is the phenomenon as perceived in its context. As one focuses on the context, however, a new context appears.

A phoneme exists as such only in combination with other phonemes which make up a word. The word is the context of the phoneme. But the word exists as such--only has “meaning”--in the larger context of the utterance, which again has meaning only in a relationship. (36)

Context is a difficult sort of notion. One can never locate “a context.” It is the greater set of phenomena which in-forms a sub-set. In the relationship between the sub-set and the greater set is the demarcation of the sub-set, the outline. The outline is necessary so that there can be a relationship. “It is this and not that (outline),” and, “You don’t know what this (sub-set) means until you relate it to that (context).” Because there is a perceived outline, there is a difference. Because there is a perceived difference, there is relationship. Because there is relationship, there can be perceived meaning.

Is this actually how people perceive? Watzlawick and his colleagues say it definitely is.

“Sensory and brain research has proved conclusively that only relationships and patterns of relationships can be perceived and these are the essence of experience.” (222)

Some examples of what this statement means in actual perception may make its implications more immediate. Consider that the eye does not “look” in the sense of pointing at a thing and taking it in; the eye scans. It moves picking up differences. A star is not a beam of light to the eye. It is a beam of light which is different from its dark background. Stare directly at a star without moving your eyes (if you can) and it disappears. Only when the eye moves away from the light to a contrasting dark point does it reappear.

Pribram describes an experiment conducted in Moscow by Eugene Sakolov which demonstrates the same process happening with auditory perception.

A tone beep of specified intensity and duration was presented at irregular intervals to a subject whose electroencephalogram, galvanic skin response and plethysmographic record were traces. At the onset of such an experiment characteristic changes in these traces are observed. These accompany behavioral alerting and are known as the orienting reaction. As the experiment proceeds, these indices of orienting become progressively more attenuated until the beep of the tone no longer seems to have any effect. This is habituation. At this point Sokolov reduced the intensity of the tone without changing any of its other characteristics. Immediately the electrical traces from the subject signaled an orienting reaction. Sokolov reasoned, therefore, that habituation could not be simply some type of fatiguing of sensory and neural elements. Rather, a process must be set up in the central nervous system against which incoming sensory signals are matched. Any change in signal would result in the orienting reaction occurred at the moment the shortened beep ended. The electrical tracers showed the alerting retains to the period of silence. (Pribram’s emphasis) (195)

When one considers the perception of differences over time, the notion of context falls more comfortable into place. Each event is part of the perceptual context of an immediately subsequent event. At the simplest level, the tone is the context for the silence that follows and vice versa. It is the event against which a difference appears when the subsequent event is perceived. At the next level up the hierarchy of context, in this case, we find the first order of pattern formation in perception, of “redundancy”. The original patterns of tone and silence are the context against which a later pattern of softer tone and silence or shorter tone and silence can make a difference. This difference is certainly of a more abstract or higher order than the difference between tone and silence. This difference is perceivable only when the original difference between tone and silence no longer evokes the orienting reaction, i.e. is no longer a difference which makes a difference.

It would appear that the organism had made a generalization about the pattern of tone and silence which allowed it no longer to expend its attention in reacting to each individual tone and silence. Only when this pattern was changed was the orienting reaction, the person’s awareness that something different was happening, evoked.

A difference-perceiving or relationship-perceiving entity which can be described as learning or adapting will perceive redundancy or pattern. Redundancy is the sort of relationship discussed above in the notion of context when this relationship is perceived over time. In Bateson’s language the terms “redundancy,” “pattern,” and “information” are used almost interchangeably in his description of the phenomena involved in perception and learning.

Any aggregate of events or objects (e.g. a sequence of phonemes, a painting, or a frog, or a culture) shall be said to contain “redundancy” or “pattern” if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a “slash mark,” such that an observer perceiving only what is one side of the slash mark can guess, with better than random success, what is on the other side of the slash mark contains information or has meaning about what is on the other side. Or in engineer’s language, the aggregate contains “redundancy.” Or, again, from the point of view of a cybernetic observer, the information available on one side of the slash mark will restrain (i.e. reduce the probability of) wrong guessing. (47)

In Pribram’s example of the tone/silence, when redundancy was perceived, i.e. when a pattern of tone and silence was perceived, the context for change in pattern was established. As there is a hierarchy of contexts, so there is a hierarchy of redundancies perceivable. One can perceive a change in a pattern, a change in a pattern of patterns, etc.

Organisms are thrust into the perceptual/communicational world of redundancy and context and the hierarchies of both by the most basic nature of perception. Organisms perceive relationship by perceiving difference. Yet when we are faced with an object/event (if only difference can be perceived, the use of the word “object” must be carefully modified), the perception of a book, for example, there is an infinite number of differences (contexts) possible which could be perceived. There are the differences between the book and the Brooklyn Bridge, a Bach concerto, a humming bird, another book, Planck’s constant, ad nauseum. Somehow some differences are perceived and some are not. If this were not so, the perceiving entity would be faced with much more information than it could possible take in. Somehow a sorting or screening must occur. This means that while “objects of perception” may fall in one’s path in a random manner, what is perceived of those objects will be sorted or screened in a non-random fashion. There must be redundancy in the act of perception. And, if this is true, the hierarchical nature of redundancy and context must be reflected in or be a reflection of the basic form of human perception.

What we have been describing so far are some of the basic characteristics of the world of information and perception, the world of form. This is the world of learning and meaning. It is a world of interaction, always involving a perceiver and perceived. both are necessary for meaning, redundancy, context or learning to exist.

The first major contribution Bateson made to the investigation of the world of form was his using the mathematical theory of Logical Types, originally advanced by Whitehead and Russell in 1910 as a formal explicative tool in describing the hierarchical nature of patterns or meaning as they are manifested in human learning and interaction. Hopefully the groundwork has been laid showing that this world and its laws are basic to all human activities. Now we shall proceed to the more formal and rigorous descriptions of this world involved in the Theory of Logical Types.

LOGICAL TYPES

In looking for an explanation to the Theory of Logical Types in Bateson’s work, one can turn to almost any article to find the theory set forth. Yet each time the description is a bit different. In each case the part on Logical Types comes near the beginning of the essay and is part of the context of understanding Bateson is trying to construct. Though the main theme of the essay may be primitive art, animal play, learning, alcoholism, schizophrenia, somatic change in evolution or comparative cultural anthropology, an understanding of logical types, when presented in a way appropriate to the subject, seems crucial to understanding Bateson’s thinking on that particular subject. Here is the explanation of the theory which precedes a discussion of the logical categories and communication.

First, it is appropriate to indicate the subject matter of the Theory of Logical Types: the theory asserts that no class can, in formal logical or mathematical discourse, be a member of itself; that a class of classes cannot be one of the classes which are its members; that a name is not the thing named; that “John Bateson” is the class of which that boy is the unique member; and so forth. These assertions that it is not at all unusual for theorists of behavioral science to commit errors which are precisely analogous to the error of classifying the name with the thing named--or eating the menu card instead of the dinner--and error of logical typing.

Somewhat less obvious is the further assertion of the theory: that a class cannot be one of those items which are correctly classified as its non-members. If we classify chairs together to constitute the class of chairs, we can go on to note that tables and lamp shades are members of a large class of “non-chairs,” but we shall commit an error in formal discourse if we count the class of chairs among the items within the class of non-chairs.

In as much as no class can be a member of itself, the class of non-chairs clearly cannot be a non-chair. Simple considerations of symmetry may suffice to convince the non-mathematical reader: (a) that the class of chairs is of the same order of abstraction (i.e., the same logical type) as the class of non-chairs; and further, (b) that if the class of non-chairs is not a non-chair.

Lastly the theory asserts that if these simple rules of formal discourse are contravened, paradox will be generated and the discourse vitiated. (Bateson’s emphasis) (42)

Mathematics can make the structure of logical types very clear because of the different languages available to it. Consider the statement, “The addition of two positive real numbers will always result in a positive real number”. This is obviously of a different logical type from, a meta-statement to the statement, “4+6=10.” It is unlikely that one would confuse the two levels because one is stated in discursive language while the other is in a mathematical symbols. However, once one begins to make statements of a higher logical type than the two examples here, only discursive language remains, and paradox is more likely. The statement, “All mathematical propositions must be proved before they can be used,” embodies such a paradox. It is a proposition about all propositions, a member of a class which also encompasses the class as a whole.

In the study of digital communication the Theory of Logical Types can be almost rigorously applied. “Digital communication” is that in which the messages bear no formal relation to the things for which they stand. The word “chair” does not look or sound like the object for which it stands, and you can’t sit in it. This is analogous to the digit “4” which bears an arbitrary relation to the quantity for which it stands and is not in itself particularly larger or smaller than any other digit. In digital communication difference of Logical Type is indicated when one message describes or types another. The message, “What are we talking about?” is of a different logical type than whatever messages made up the discussion which one can imagine to have preceded it. It is a meta-message; a message about a class of messages. Unfortunately for rigor, there is no such thing as a purely digital message. All spoken language is accompanied by analogic communication such as gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, etc. An analogic message is one in which there is a formal relationship between the message and its referent. How broadly you smile tells me how happy you are, or how happy you want me to think you are. Usually we say it is the aspects of analogic communication which accompany a digital spoken message. The establish a context by telling the receiver how the message is to be understood. They are statements about how one is to understand a message in the structure of the message itself as well as in all the other sorts of contexts in which any message is conveyed. These are of a higher logical type, but here the ladder of the hierarchy begins to seem more like an ascending net. The Theory of Logical Types has become a formal description of a very useful way of approaching and understanding phenomena rather than rigorous mathematical theorem.

In the study of living organisms, the Theory of Logical Types is helpful in understanding the inevitable hierarchy in the communication among these organisms. Still, there are certain other differences besides those already enumerated between the logical types involved in a logical system and the phenomena occurring in communication which we can use logical types to understand. In a logical system, if it can be proven that a certain combination of premises leads to a paradox or untenable conclusion, the whole structure of premises and paradoxes can be discarded. It is as if they never existed. Organisms, however, existing in time, must embody their premises in some form before a paradox can occur. At the point of the paradox, the experience of the organism in its embodiment of ultimately paradoxical premises does not cease to exist.

An example of this phenomenon is found in the experiments described by Bateson in which dogs have been taught to discriminate between a circle and an ellipse. Gradually the ellipse is rounded and the circle is flattened. At the point where the two look so much alike that discrimination is impossible, the trained dogs consistently begin to exhibit bizarre behavior. They cease eating, bite their handlers, or demonstrate various other behavior which seems to indicate a mistrust for their environment. A naive dog facing the indistinguishable circle and ellipse will simple guess, accepting his reward as he gets it.

In this experiment a dog not only learns that he will be rewarded for picking a circle, he learns the meta-premise, “This is a context for discrimination.” Bateson theorizes that gradually the smell of the laboratory or the harness in the experiment comes to be a “context marker” which can signify to the dog that the patterns of learning which he has encountered there before are again in effect. Yet faced with indistinguishable configurations, he is in paradox. His experience in trying to discriminate is in fact a comment on the class of activities involved in discrimination. In trying to discriminate, his experience is that discrimination is impossible. Because he is unable to change meta-premises from “I should discriminate” to “Discrimination is impossible, I should guess,” the dog seems to embody the paradox as it becomes pained and disoriented. It’s communicational pattern disintegrates.

The fact that an organism cannot quickly cease to operate on certain premises, or to perceive in certain patterns when those premises or patterns lead to pain or paradox is one aspect of the economics of the adaptation or organisms. It is the difficult aspect of what is still a necessary process. Bateson uses logical types to explain the way in which an organism “sinks” certain abstract premises in order to retain flexibility in immediate sorts of interaction. The process which we saw in the experiment where people became habituated to a specific tone/silence pattern can be seen as happening universally among organisms (or any system of a certain complexity). Once the pattern of tone/silence is perceived or generalized, the person stops responding with the orienting reaction. The person then can save the attention involved in the orienting reaction for new and refined perceptions such as changes in pattern. The generalization gives new flexibility to perception. Any premise which can be acted upon in a more general or abstract form (at a higher logical type) allows the organism this flexibility to immediate perception and action.

Some types of knowledge can conveniently be sunk to unconscious levels, but other types must be kept on the surface. Broadly, we can afford to sink those sorts of knowledge which continue to be true regardless of changes in the environment, but we must maintain in an accessible place all those controls of behavior which must be modified for every instance. The lion can sink into his unconscious the proposition that zebras are his natural prey, but in dealing with any particular zebra he must be able to modify the movements of his attack to fit with the particular terrain and the particular evasive tactics of the particular zebra.

The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatics of particular instances.

The premises may, economically, be sunk but particular conclusions must be conscious. But the “sinking,” though economical, is still done at a price--the price of inaccessibility. Since the level to which things are sunk is characterized by iconic algorithms and metaphor, it becomes difficult for the organism to examine the matrix out of which his conscious conclusions spring. (48)

The formal description of the “sinking” of premises continues to be useful even as one moves out of areas which could in any way be conceived of as involving learning or adaptation on the part of the individual organism. It is a natural systems phenomenon of the process called “evolution”. In the human being and other land mammals the presence of air around the nose is certain enough so that the control of breathing can be sunk into the more primitive or autonomic portions of the brain only to be overridden when immediate conscious control of breathing is necessary. Though we can breathe in many different patterns which we consciously choose, when rendered unconscious, we continue to breathe just as our hearts continue to beat. A porpoise, on the other hand, cannot count on air being around the blow hole at any given time. For that reason control of its breathing is located in the highest, most complex, most conscious part of its brain. The difference this makes was tragically learned during early experiments with dolphins. When for one reason or another they were anesthetized and became unconscious, they stopped breathing and died.

So far we have described what might be called the “evolutionary purpose” of the sinking of premises from one perspective. The process of generalizing and sinking premises allows flexibility at the level of immediate response. There is another evolutionary purpose equally important. Flexibility or response allows for stability of general premises. This is every bit as important for an organism or any system capable of adaptation. the most general or abstract premises must change slowly, if the system is to maintain its coherence. Bateson describes how this works in a finite system such as the human brain.

Gestalt perception--the perception of pattern--enables the brain to discard details and to name complex unites. It is necessary, however, to consider in somewhat more detail the role of pattern in the economics of circuitry. The brain is finite and, while the possible linkings of neurons mist be astronomically numerous, there is still a problem of accomplishing what must be accomplished with the finite means available. Where Freud envisaged an economics of psychic energy, the engineer of today would argue for an economics of circuitry. If the same way of thought can be applied to two separate problems, this is a saving of circuitry. At the highest level, this sort of economy is practiced by scientists who use the differential calculus both for the computation of trajectories and analysis of chemical processes.

The basic analysis of this economics has been begun by Ross Ashby, whose Design for a Brain must be regarded as unimportant landmark in both psychiatry and communications theory. Ashby’s primary thesis concerns the interdependence of variables within complex systems, where every variable is directly or indirectly liked with each other. He points out that when such systems have adaptive characteristics, that is, when they tend to seek a steady state, there is a necessary relationship between those variables which change their values rapidly and those others in which change is comparatively slow. Broadly, when the system encounters load or stress, the rapidly changing variables act to maintain the stability of the slowly changing variables. The general idea may be illustrated by considering an acrobat with his balance pole. The acrobat maintains the ongoing truth of the proposition, “I am on the high wire,” by varying the position and angle of his balancing pole. The effect of pegging the rapidly changing variable--fixing the relationship between the pole and the acrobat’s body--will result in rapid disruption of the more lasting proposition: the acrobat will fall. (33)

It is in the interest of the organism to have the more changeable premises vary so that more abstract, more deeply sunk premises can remain stable. If an organism learns certain abstract premises in a certain definable context, when it again finds itself in what seems to be the same context, it will endeavor to operate on the previously learned premises even if it has to manipulate its perception of immediate data to do this. The necessary redundancy in the act of immediate perception acts in service of maintaining more abstract patterns of perception.

CATEGORIES OF LEARNING AND COMMUNICATION

Bateson has formalized his descriptions of the processes discussed here in the article, “Logical Categories of Learning and Communication.” In this article (which we will follow rather closely in this explanation) he discusses the different “levels of learning;” Using his numbered levels of learning may give us a more useful set of terms for talking about such processes as “sinking” than we have had to this point.

Bateson is rather casual with his use of the terms “learning” and “level” in this article. For the sake of clarity we can say that change of premises of a certain numbered level shall be called “learning” of that level. So change in premises of punctuation which are at level II we would call Learning II. Usually this distinction is not necessary, or is supplied by the context. In such cases the abbreviation “L II” will be used.

Bateson describes the simple receipt of a message with a specific response as “Zero Learning.” The message received in a Zero Learning situation may be of any logical type. While other levels of learning may be characterized by the level or logical type of “error” to be corrected by trial and error, Zero Learning does not involve trial and error at all. It is mostly a concept to help in definition. The likelihood is small that anything occurs in the lives of organisms which is completely this simple. Bateson offers the following list of “phenomena which approach this degree of simplicity:”

(a) In experimental settings, when “learning” is complete and the animal gives approximately 100 per cent correct responses to the repeated stimulus.

(b) In cases of habituation, where the animal has ceased to give overt response to what was formerly a disturbing stimulus.

(c) In cases where the pattern of the response is minimally determined by experience and maximally determined by a problem of accomplishing what must be accomplished with the finite means available. Where Freud envisaged an economics of psychic energy, the engineer of today would argue for an economics of circuitry. If the same way of thought can be genetic factors.

(d) In cases where the response is now highly stereotyped.

(e) In simple electronic circuits, where the circuit structure is not itself subject to change resulting from the passage of impulses within the circuit--i.e., where the casual links between “stimulus” and “response” are as the engineers say “soldered in.” (Bateson’s emphasis) (50)

Learning I is a change of response in a given context when both responses are from the same “set of alternatives.” This is the learning usually talked about and experimented with by psychologists who work in laboratories with animals. Bateson offers the following examples of that which could be considered Learning I:

(a) There is the phenomenon of habituation--the change from responding to each occurrence of a repeated event to not overtly responding. There is also the extinction or loss of habituation, which may occur as a result of a more or less long gap or other interruption in the sequence of repetitions of the stimulus event.

(b) The most familiar and perhaps most studied case is that of the classical Pavlovian conditioning. At Time 2 the dog salivates in response to the buzzer; he did not do this at Time I.

(c) There is the “learning” which occurs in contexts of instrumental reward and instrumental avoidance.

(d) There is the phenomenon of rote learning, in which an item in the behavior of the organism becomes a stimulus for another item of behavior.

(e) There is the disruption, extinction, or inhibition of “completed” learning which may follow change or absence of reinforcement. (51)

It is important to note that the notion of repeatable context, (redundancy of perception) is absolutely essential for all levels of learning above Zero Leaning. If repeatable context is not a valid description of how an organism organizes its perceptual world, then all leaning is Zero learning. If the context at time B when the dog salivates in response to a bell is the same to the dog as time A when it did not salivate, then it can be said that “learning” has occurred. If the context is not the same, then we can only say that the dog’s experience is somehow a discrimination between the events of time A and the events of time A plus time B which caused it to salivate in response to the bell. “It would logically follow that all questions of the type, ‘Is this behavior “learned” or “innate”?’ should be answered in favor of genetics.”

We would argue that without the assumption of repeatable context, our thesis falls to the ground, together with the whole general concept of “learning.” If, on the other hand, the assumption of repeatable context is accepted as somehow true of the organisms which we study, then the case for logical typing of the phenomena of learning necessarily stands, because the notion “context” is itself subject to logical typing. (52)

The idea of certain events functioning as “context marker” which was mentioned briefly earlier is here helpful in understanding how an organism knows from which set of alternatives it must pick a response to a given stimulus. (The work “stimulus” is used here with the understanding that in the flow of an interaction any event may be regarded as “stimulus,” “response,” or “reinforcement” depending on one’s point of view, i.e. how one punctuates or gives order to the sequence.) The harness tells the dog that he is back in the experimental context with all that that implies. When context markers are not readily apparent, an organism will often spend its energy trying to find one. It cannot settle into operating within the set of alternatives implied by the context until the context is established. Questions like, “What is this course all about?” or, “Is this serious?” are verbalized examples of organisms in search of context markers. Usually the markers are clear and understood. A classroom with a blackboard, being seated by a maitre d’, a white flag, a cow’s stall in the milking barn, the opening or closing of the elevator doors--all these can easily be understood in the way in which they might function to tell an organism that was used to being in that contest from what set of alternatives it was choosing its behavior at a given time.

A change in the set of alternatives elicited by a given context marker is an example of Learning II. Any change in the set of alternatives in a context or in the pattern of punctuating events into contexts or of identifying context markers would be Learning II. The dog who went into “experimental neurosis” as a result of no longer being able to discriminate between the ellipse and the circle did so because of being put in the wrong at the Level II. In Hull’s experiments with rote learning he found that all his subjects gradually improved in their ability to memorize meaningless syllables even though the specific syllables learned one day were of no help in remembering the syllables on subsequent days. They learned to learn within that context. This is Learning II.

In talking about Learning II we will be using the term “punctuation” a great deal. Punctuation is the act of ordering perceived phenomena into meaningful units. An example drawn from Wazlawick, et. al., may help to make the concept clearer. Suppose a husband and wife interact according to a pattern in which he is withdrawn and she is a nag. Each person’s behavior in the pattern can seem perfectly logical, depending on how you punctuate the series of interaction, i.e., where you choose to start a “cause and effect” explanation of what is happening. He may punctuate the series as follows: “When she nags me, all I can do is withdraw, and then she nags me more--She is never satisfied.” She may punctuate the same series differently and therefore draw a very different conclusion as to what the whole interaction means: “He is withdrawn so I nag him to get some interaction going, but he only withdraws more--It is impossible to get any response from him.” Withdraw-nag: the only difference is punctuation.

One’s habits of punctuating events are of a higher logical type than the stream of events in and interaction that one is perceiving. They are one’s Level II premises about interaction in action. Thes haits are commonly enumerated when talking about an individual by adjectives which are meant to describe a person’s “character”. Descriptive terms such as “dependent,” “morose,” “competitive,” “reasonable,” etc., are all ways of naming a person’s habits of organizaing experience of interactions and therefore of contributing to creating the type of interaction that occurs. For example, a person who constantly suspects other people of talking about him will probably act in a manner which will cause other people to talk about him.

Seen from the point of view of the person being described, the adjectives above name habits of punctuation. Seen from the point of view of an observer, these abstract patterns, as Bateson reminds us, are ways of interacting and do not exist in a vacuum.

The critical reader will have observed that . . . adjectives . . . which purport to describe individual character are really not strictly applicable to the individual but rather describe transactions between the individual and his material and human environment. No man is “resourceful” or “dependent” or “fatalistic” in a vacuum. His characteristic, whatever it be, is not his but is rather a characteristic of what goes on between him and something (somebody) else. (Bateson’s emphasis) (53)

The reader may have noticed that in the study so far the terms “premise” and “pattern” have been used almost interchangeably. The above quotation helps to explain why this is so. A “habit of punctuation” is effectively the same thing as a “premise may be observed in operation, i.e., in interaction, is the same as a “pattern of interacting.” This is an extremely important point. It means that what at first may seem to be a laziness or lack of precision in our language is actually an embodying of a phenomenological truth which is denied in the structure of one’s usual thinking and speaking. We tend to think about phenomena in spatial terms. A “premise about interaction” would exist “in” someone’s head while a pattern of interacting would exist “outside” of the person. The premise “flows through” the intermediate realm of the body or is translated by the body into action and “in” the action is the pattern. It is vary hard to think in terms or images other than those of space and substances. Yet here we are talking about forms of communication which are distinguishable only by the different perspectives of the observer in relation to each. The act of giving form to one’s perceptions of interactions and the act of participating in interactions are transforms of what is inevitably one inseparable overall activity. They are though of as different acts only because one is observable to an outside observer (patterns of interaction) and one is not (habits of punctuation). These terms (“premise” and “pattern”) will continue to be used interchangeably. Where one is more helpful as an explanatory term in a certain context, it will be used, though always a minor change of wording would make another of the terms as appropriate.

Patterns of the level of abstraction of Learning II, those which can be named by descriptions of “character,” are those patterns or characteristics which one seeks to be able to know or comment upon when one is engaged in a “search for identity.” It is this kind of pattern which one will almost inevitably name in answer to the question: “What kind of a person are you?”

Premises of Learning II are enduring enough to be terms part of one’s identity because they are of a high level of abstraction. Abstract premises are less modifiable by day to day interaction and learning.

We suggest that what is learned in Learning II is a way of punctuating events. But a way a of punctuating is not true or false. There is nothing contained in the propositions of the learning that can be tested against reality. It is like a picture seen in an inkblot; it has neither correctness nor incorrectness. It is only a way of seeing the inkblot. (Bateson’s emphasis) (54)

The premises of Learning II do not, in fact supply a base from which the details of experience can deduced. The actual details which the subject encounters can commonly be found to fit procrustean bed of whatever premises he has learned. (34)

This means that Learning II premises, because of their abstraction, are inevitable self-validating.

In fact, the propositions which govern punctuation have the general characteristic of being self-validating. What we term “context” includes the subject’s behavior as well as the external events. But this behavior is controlled by former Learning II and therefore it will be of such a kind as to mold the total context to fit the expected punctuation. In sum, this self-validating characteristic of the content of Learning II has the effect that such learning is almost ineradicable. It follows that Learning II acquired in infancy is likely to persist through life. Conversely, we must expect many of the important characteristics of an adult’s punctuation to have their roots in early infancy. (55)

One further characteristic of Level II premises is that because they are abstract premises learned in infancy and more deeply sunk than the premises of Learning I, they tend to be unconscious. A person, given clear reflection of his actions by those around him, may be able to see the results of his Level II premises. For example, “I am foolish, loving, up-tight, dependent,” or whatever. It is still very difficult for a person to be conscious of the actual patterns of punctuation which go into these statements. Bateson points out in several places that the economics of sinking premises makes the unconscious evolutionary necessary for human beings. To be continually conscious of how one structures one’s perception would overload one with information while greatly limiting the attention one could pay to one’s environment. In fact full awareness of how one perceives is impossible. A television set, to use Bateson’s example, could never be made to report on the screen both the picture it received and all the electronic processes that went into putting that picture on the screen. To do this would take additional circuitry whose functioning could not be reported on the screen without additional circuitry . . .

The interactional manifestations of Learning II premises are called “emotions.” these pre-verbal “signals of state” are the same precise algorithms* of punctuation which we have been discussing. Poets have known for years that the division between “intellectual” and “emotional” is an arbitrary cutting of an organic continuum. Blake said, “A tear is an intellectual thing,” and Pascal makes the same point (which Bateson maintains the French as a culture understand better than Americans), “Le coeur a sea raison ne connait point.” (The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.)

Describing the emotions as “signals of state” in their interactional significance, Bateson says:

Signals of state in the language of psychology thus become either reinforcements or signals about the contingencies of reinforcement in the language which would describe relationship . . .

Next, I think I should underline the fact which is familiar to all of us: these signals of state which function to define the contingencies of relationship are usually nonverbal, often unconsciously emitted, and often unconsciously received. We do not stop to analyze the structure and grammar of our relationships while we are participating in them. Instead, we trust to the fact that we are all members of a culture and have therefore been trained in expectations regarding the contingencies of relationship. This training, of course, involves a more abstract order of learning - learning of a higher logical type - than that which I was talking about in discussing the triads of stimulus, response, and reinforcement. I call it a “higher type of learning because that Gestalten with which it deals are larger, but this is learning about contingencies of relationship is in general more archaic and more unconscious than the learning of a single adaptive act. (my emphasis) (29)

Premises or expressions about patterns of relationship, whenever they are manifest, involve Learning II. Dreams provide us with another example of this. Most dreams, according to Bateson, are pure expressions of relationship with the “true” relata often exchanged of others. He gives the example of a dream about small man in the desert and spring on top of a high mountain. This dream expresses one possible set of contingencies of relationship between a man and his mother. Like non-human mammalian communication. dreams are about relationship with no way of designating the true relata and with no way of expressing tense (time) or the negative. They can only say “doing”, never “did” or “will do”, and they can say “this is happening” but not “this is not happening”. Dreams often deal with material from very early in life, as they are expressing patterns of relationship learned early in life of which the dreamer is often unconscious.

The pattern we are developing here will be used again and again when we come to try to understand different forms of psychotherapy in Bateson’s terms. It is the crudest beginnings of a “calculus of personality”. The more “fundamental” the “characteristic” of a person - the higher the logical type of the interactional premises involved - the earlier in life these premises were learned - the less available these premises/patterns are to consciousness. Using the designations of the different levels of learning, we can talk specifically about what order of premise a therapy is trying to correct and what “correcting” means to that therapy. But we still have another level of learning to discuss.

________________

· An “algorithm” is “any particular procedure for solving a certain type of problem” according to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language: Unabridged Edition, Random House, New York, 1966.

It may be helpful to recapitulate the levels of learning out of which the above generalization comes. This recapitulation should also be helpful as we move on to Leaning III.

Zero learning is characterized by specificity of response, which--right or wrong-- is not subject to correction.

Learning I is change in specificity of response by correction of errors or choice within a set of alternatives.

Learning II is change in the process of Learning I, e.g., a corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choice is made, or it is a change in how the sequence of experience is punctuated.

Learning III is change in the process of Learning II, e.g., a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives from which choice is made . . .

Learning IV would be change in Learning III, but probable does not occur in any adult living organism on this earth. Evolutionary process has, created organisms whose ontogeny brings them to Level III. the combination of phylogenesis with ontogenesis, in fact, achieves Level IV. (Bateson’s emphasis) (56)

In talking about Learning III we are in areas of experience where words are inevitable inadequate and even misleading. We are trying to describe by conscious use of words a corrective change in the sets of premises of Learning II, when the Learning II premises are the abstract, archaic and mostly unconscious premises which make up one’s “identity” or “character”. What Bateson achieves with the help of the Theory of Logical Types is a clear exposition of the formal outlines, though not the actual experience, of Learning III.

Bateson points out first that it is possible to exchange premises of a certain logical type without necessarily learning any premises of a higher logical type. It is possible to change a response learned as a result of Learning I for the opposite response, also Learning I, without necessarily learning anything about the pattern of reversal of learning (Learning II). By the same token, it is possible to exchange one way of punctuating experience for another without increasing one’s facility to make such corrective changes or being able to understand the pattern involved in the exchange. Achieving new Learning II premises does not require Learning III.

The following is Bateson’s list of the sorts of changes he would be willing to call Leaning III.

(a) The individual might learn to form more readily those habits the forming of which we call Leaning II.

(b) He might learn to close for himself the “loopholes” which could allow him to avoid Learning III.

(c) He might learn to change the habits acquired by Learning II.

(d) He might learn that he is a creature which can and does unconsciously achieve Learning II.

(e) He might learn to limit or direct his Learning II.

(f) If Learning II is a learning of the contexts of Learning I, then Learning III should be a learning of the contexts of those contexts. (57)

Consider again the economics described in the “sinking” of premises. An abstraction at a higher level gives flexibility at a lower level. We must be describing in the term “Learning III” some abstraction which will give flexibility in the premises involved in one’s identity, or “freedom from their bondage,” as Bateson puts it.

But any freedom from the bondage of habit must also denote a profound redefinition of the self. If I stop at the level of Learning II, “I” am the aggregate of those characteristics which I call my “character.” “I” am my habits of acting in context and shaping and perceiving the context in which I act. Selfhood is a product or aggregate of Learning II. To the degree that a Man [sic.] achieves Learning III, and learns to perceive and act in terms of the contexts of contexts, his “self” will no longer function as a model argument in the punctuation of expression. (58)

Learning III can be the resolution of the paradoxes which must develop when one tries self improvement. when one says, for example, “I should not be so dependent,” one is put in a paradoxical position in which the aim, (being less dependent) is precluded. In making the statement, one is moving to a position which is of a higher logical type than that of being dependent, yet one is still a dependent person. A member of the class being described, a dependent person, seeks to comment on the class as a whole, “I should not be dependent.” One is in the same paradox as when one is told to be “spontaneous.” (Being spontaneous on request is the opposite of spontaneity.) The only difference is that here one is both the teller and the told, the commander and the follower, the strong and the dependent one. One can never tell one’s “self” what to do. the split inevitably generates paradox and makes accomplishment impossible. It should be obvious, however, that this paradoxical position is one which most of us are in a great deal of the time.

Learning III would involve what Bateson calls a “bursting open” of the categories which made up one’s dependency. Events and interactions which formerly were punctuated similarly, forming the pattern of dependency would take on a new particularity as the old unifying pattern of “dependent self” was transcended. Each event which was formerly part of a pattern would take on a new uniqueness. This would involve the resolution of the contraries of self-improvement by a redefinition of each particular context of interaction in such a way that the unifying concept of “self” was not relevant. One would have flexibility in punctuating events. The habits of punctuation formerly identified as “my self” would be seen to be relative, changeable, situational. As they became situational, each situation could be both more immediate (because there were no rigid Level II premises to be protected) and more profound (because one’s experience was congruent with and confirmed understandings of the most abstract and fundamental nature).

If, as I have suggested above, the creature is driven to level III by “contraries” generated at level II, then we may expect that it is the resolving of these contraries that will constitute positive reinforcement at Level III. Such resolution can take may forms.

Even the attempt at level III can be dangerous, and some fall by the wayside. These are often labeled by psychiatry as psychotic, and many of them find themselves inhibited from using the first person pronoun.

For others, more successful, the resolution of the contraries may be a collapsing of much that was learned at level II, revealing a simplicity in which hunger leads directly to eating, and the identified self is no longer in charge of organizing the behavior. These are the incorruptible innocents of the world.

For other, more creative, the resolution of contraries reveals a world in which personal identity merges into all the processes of relationship in some vase ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction. That any of these can survive seems almost miraculous, but some are perhaps saved from focus in on the minutiae of life. Every detail of the universe is seen as proposing a view of the whole. These are the people for whom Blake wrote the famous advice in the “Auguries of Innocence:”

“To see the World in a Grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.” (59)

We will talk at great length later in the study about people who are driven out of the unifying concept of “self” by the contraries of Learning II, but who do not achieve Learning III where the concept of self is no longer necessary. These people are commonly called “schizophrenics”.

It is important to note that positive reinforcement at level III involves the resolution of contraries at level II. This pictures the ultimate state for an individual human being as a congruence of patterns of all logical types. Such a congruence would eliminate the need for the process which we described earlier in which one has to manipulate immediate perception in order to maintain Learning II premises. As Bateson has indicated, the congruence involved in resolutions of Learning II contraries offers a return to the possibility of immediate perception. We will return to this notion at the end of Chapter IV.

In our talk of the “resolution of contraries” we have landed squarely in the realm of the great wisdom literatures and teaching which humans have evolved. It will be enough for now to note that this is where we are. Perhaps a little later in the work we can say a bit more about the terrain.

Learning III is not necessarily a description of the sort of awakening which is talked about when one discusse the great wisdom traditions. Though “resolution of all contraries” and “total congruence” are certainly synonymous with as pure a state of “enlightenment” as a person can achieve, Learning III can be used to describe far more modest sorts of changes, as Bateson’s list of what might be called Learning III indicates. As this author has experienced it, Learning III has involved a gradual improvement of the facility for identifying constellations of feelings and responses with contexts which “resonate” with, or are isomorphic with contexts of early childhood. When such an identification of feeling constellation with context takes place, new options are available. For example, when comment such as the following can be made, “The intensity of sadness and loneliness I feel at getting accidentally separated from my wife in a shopping center has to do with much earlier experiences of separation and fears of abandonment,” a needless conflict (“Where the hell have your been?”), can be avoided.

There is little that can be said about Learning IV at this time. Bateson’s mention of it in the listing quoted at the beginning of our discussion of Learning III is the only time he ever uses the term. When we have gone into the nature of systems in greater detail, we may be able to put a bit of flesh on the bones which Bateson provides.

PATHOLOGY

In his explanation of levels of learning, Bateson is talking about a specific system: an individual human being considered over time. Yet the patterns which were described as reflecting the interaction of the different levels of learning, patterns such as the sinking of premises to higher levels of abstraction to give flexibility at lower levels, the protection of abstract premises in the system by the adjustment of more flexible variables, and the possibility of gaining flexibility in the abstract patterns which define the nature of the system by changing the boundedness of the system in relation to the larger system of which it is a part, these descriptions are true of any information processing system. Bateson’s contribution has been to take the learning’s about the nature of patterns and systems which the fields of cybernetics, systems theory and information theory have gained and to apply them to human interaction.

Bateson’s earliest use of the sort of understandings we have been discussing to illuminate patterns of human interaction was in his “double bind” theory of the etiology of schizophrenia which he put forward in 1956 along with Jackson, Haley, and Weakland. (18) In that paper he described patterns of interaction in a family which had a schizophrenic member. this is a slightly more complicated version of the setting we described earlier in which the dog endeavored to discriminate between a circle and an ellipse where discrimination was no longer possible. The dog’s “embodying the paradox” in its subsequent behavior, its psychosis, is a paradigm of the process involved in human schizophrenic behavior.

We hypothesize that there will be a breakdown in any individual’s ability to discriminate between Logical Types whenever a double bind situation occurs. the general characteristics of this situation are the following:

(1) When the individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated, so that he may respond appropriately.

(2) And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and one of these denies the other.

(3) And, the individual is unable to comment on messages being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order of message to respond to, i.e., his cannot make a meta-communicative statement. (19)

An example of this sort of communication is seen in the following excerpt from the beginning of a family therapy session with a father, mother and their 26 year old son, John, who has been diagnosed schizophrenic. John has been hospitalized following an incident in which he smashed several windows in his parents’ home. John is bitter about being hospitalized.

Therapist: (to Mother and Father) How was your Thanksgiving?

Father: (in a sad voice) I couldn’t eat a bite without thinking of him. (meaning John)

John: I want to come home.

Father: (very angry) And break more windows?

John in the relationship with his father is in a situation in which it is very important for him to discriminate accurately what sort of message a message is. He takes his father’s first statement to be an expression of pain that he (John) is away from home. He also takes it that he is to blame for his father’s pain. He offers a solution. The father’s second statement seems to tell John that he was completely wrong about what sort of message his (father’s) first statement was. It imputes madness and/or badness to John. The father’s intense anger raises the specter of John’s being rejected and puts the continuance of their relationship in question. Yet the cause of this “challenge to the relationship” is attributed to John’s behavior. Any meta-communicative statement by John is effectively preempted by this demonstration of how such a statement would further jeopardize his relationship with his father. John’s response in the session was to sit for some minutes with a glazed look in his eyes.

As Bateson refined his understanding of the “double bind” situation, he dropped the “binder” and “victim” element of the formulation. (61) Also, the name lent itself to reification. People tended to think of a “double bind” as a thing. It is not a thing, even if thought of as a “thing” which one person does to another. The double bind is immanent in the messages which make a relationship. In the interweaving of contexts, that is of the means of classifying message, there are embodied inconsistencies or “tangles, to use Bateson’s later term.

If we return to the family session above, this later way of formulating the “double bind” can be illustrated. Any message proposes a certain sort of relationship between the sender and the receiver. the premises about what sort of relationship one is a part of which each person uses in understanding the “meaning” of a given message are what we have earlier called L II premises. Each message in this family proposes a paradoxical sort of relationship. In the particular sequence above, each message is taken by the receiver to propose a relationship in which the receiver of the message is the cause of the sender’s predicament. Father seems to propose John as the cause of his sadness. John, responding to the message, assents to the content of the message, but proposes the blame be on the father for being the cause of his hospitalization. He reclassifies the relationship that the content proposes. The father responds by justifying himself as he proposes John as the cause of the trouble at home which caused him (John) to be hospitalized. This chronic “yes, but” pattern is part of the L II premises of everyone in the family. It is a way of punctuating an interaction into a form, (i.e. of understanding a relationship) which inevitably denies the punctuation in the particular instance of anyone who shares the same habits of punctuating. In the old sense, John is in a double bind, but in the more refined way of describing, John shares a pattern of communication with all the members of his family. each continually “binds” the other. Each reinterprets any statement by the other as blaming to himself and responds in a self-justifying way. The other takes the justification as blame and continues the pattern. Messages are continually being reclassified by each succeeding response.

While communication patterns may be formally similar throughout a family system, the assumption about particular roles within the system is quite divergent. In the family above, the formal pattern, that of always assuming one is being blamed and attempting to restructure the relationship to one in which the other is to blame, is also a description of roles individuals take. The need for someone to blame is largely filled by the son’s behavior. This makes the communication pattern and relationship premises (L II premises/patterns) of both parents consistent with their experience without the marriage relationship having to be the focus. If the parents were to focus this habit of punctuation on each other continually, either their marriage or their ways of understanding relationships would have to radically change.

L II patterns are the abstract patterns which describe a whole relationship. When one person is dominant and the other submissive, both are learning the formal pattern of the whole relationship. This trait is evolutionary necessary in human beings largely because of the great complexity involved in the job of parenting. Because of the ways humans learn the abstract form of the whole relationship even while engaging in only one role, a person can be a competent parent with only the experience of having been a child in a parent-child relating system. Laing calls the phenomenon “mapping” (185) and seems to see it restricting freedom and inducing pathology in family systems. The fact that paradox and inducing pathology in family systems. The fact that paradox and therefore pathology are made possible by the hierarchical nature of human leaning does not make this less necessary.

An example of L II patterns being maintained in a whole family system is seen in the common phenomenon of a family which has a schizophrenic member generating a new sick person when the original schizophrenic gets better or leaves the system. Each member of the family shares L II premises which require that the family have sick member in order to be experienced as consistent. When the sick member is removed (truly leaves, not just enter a hospital) great anxiety comes upon the remaining family members. This is the intense anxiety of being in an inconsistent world, one in which one cannot understand or give form to relationship messages. One’s level II premises are inappropriate. Very quickly experience in the system is made to conform to the premises that organize it. “ formerly “well” person has a breakdown.

An epitome of this process in which the emotional life of one member will alter drastically to make the whole system consistent can be seen in what we will call “emotion transfer” for lack of a better term.

When two or more persons share the same L II premises about their pattern of relationship, they “feel” the emotions which express that this pattern is taking place. For example, in a context of financial distress, both husband and wife may unconsciously expect their pattern to be one in which one person is depressed and the other is comforting and supportive. At such times the stage is set for what often seems to be a transfer of emotion. At one moment A is depressed and B is comforting. Shortly, through processes neither of them can explain and which neither is likely even to notice, A is comforting a depressed B. Here the L II premise in this context is the pattern of one depressed and one comforting. If the pattern cannot be maintained by A being depressed, B will gradually become so. Often there is a great deal of unconscious maneuvering on the part of the “down” person to effect the switch of roles. The “feelings” of depression and solicitation (or any other emotions experienced in relating) are the individual’s expression of patterns of punctuation, L II premises, which are the transform of the L II patterns embodied in the whole relationship. To put it another way, each person in a long term relationship will have L II premises in that context which are isomorphic with the form of the relationship as a whole.

In discussing the double bind we begin to see the L II premises in their manifestation as patterns of interaction. We are in an area of human systems phenomena which seems almost magical. Person A can seemingly take B’s depression onto himself. Emotion seems to transfer by magic from one person to the other as the more abstract form of the relationship is kept constant. One begins to understand the feeling many “schizophrenics” describe when they call themselves “God,” “Jesus,” or “the Virgin Mary.” It is the experience of taking onto oneself the anger or guilt of others in a family through processes that seem magical, The “schizophrenic’s” only conclusion can be “I must be doing it, therefore I must have supernatural powers.”

Perhaps a little more detailed description of the family above, we will call them the Jones, will make the way L II premises interact in a family system more understandable. We have said that each of the Jones maintains a similar way of understanding the messages of the others. Each experiences himself being blamed whenever the other describes any situation that is less than perfect. Each attempts to communicate in such a way that the relationship will be redefined so that he can longer possibly be to blame. In this situation, the punctuation which makes people feel blamed where no blame was overtly offered introduces the message, “Someone is to blame.” In the Jones family the youngest child turned out to be the one to make this pattern consistent. It is he who makes the family relating pattern as a whole isomorphic with the punctuation, the L II premises of all the members. He (John) feels least secure in the relationship with his parents and so feels it most incumbent upon himself to make things be consistent. He takes the message “someone is to blame” as an attribution to himself. He must be to blame. Yet he does not “consciously” know he is being blamed. It is only part of the logical structure of other messages. Since no overt blaming messages were given him by his family until he did something “bad” to actualize them, he often experienced himself as being blamed though he could not find the reason for it. Ultimately he began to experience voices in his head blaming him.

The message “You are to blame,” is a paradoxical attribution. At the level II it means “If we are to agree on the form of our relationship, you are to be a person who is to blame.” At Level I it means, “Your are doing wrong and should change if we are to relate satisfactorily.” John gradually evolved a way to resolve the paradox. He did many things which overtly made him the cause of blame in his family. That made the punctuation patterns of his parents and siblings logically consistent. They were not to blame because he was to blame. Yet he did the things he did for reasons he couldn’t control (he was “sick”). He was not to blame. This embodiment of the premises of the family allows everyone, including John, to have his punctuation, that someone other than himself was to blame. Unfortunately, such paradox in human communicating/relating patterns is extremely costly. John’s resolution of the problem, that he was to blame but he was not to blame for being to blame, cost him just what he was trying to keep, a relationship as a loved son to his parents. The harder he worked to make his family’s L II premises consistent with his experience, the more he made impossible relationships as he wanted them to be. His resolution of the problem cost him the ability to organize his own experience into congruent patterns.

When L II premises embody a paradox, the person who has learned to punctuate relationship messages in this way is unable to participate in a coherent consistent pattern of relating. This is the situation of people who are called “schizophrenic”. In John Jones’ case, any relationship in which he participated which was close or important to him, he organized into a pattern in which he was “to blame”. He put a great deal of energy into structuring and controlling the relationships in his life, yet he always seemed to find the other person furious at him for behavior he felt he could not control.

A person who is “neurotic” is someone who operates on L II premises inappropriate to the context. He punctuates relating into patterns which are stylized, inflexible and often unsatisfactory. A “psychotic” person operates on L II premises which embody a paradox and which tend toward the denial of relating. To be inevitably “wrong” at L II leads the psychotic person to an inability to understand patterns of relating. In practice this means he loses the ability to tell what sort of message a message is. Nothing in relationship can be taken for granted and be assumed to be understood by both parties. There is no place to start. As Watzlawick, et. al., put it: “Paradox not only can invade interaction and affect our behavior and our sanity, but it also challenges our belief in the consistency, and therefore the ultimate soundness, of our universe.” (223)

We have seen how the attribution, “you are to blame” is inherently paradoxical and some of the ramifications of this paradox in John Jones’ life. A further discussion of paradox in its more formal logical manifestations will help us lay the base for our discussion of psychotherapy and is offered early in that section. “Paradox” is the common denominator of systems which generate pathology and those that generate “health” such as psychotherapy.

PSYCHOTHERAPY

Though Bateson himself has written very little about the specific ways in which psychotherapy causes change, a number of people who see him as their mentor have described this process in detail. Haley, Jackson, Watzlawick and Weakland conceptualizations derived from the Theory of Logical Types to describe the way in which therapy causes change. These people have talked at length about the “therapeutic paradox” or “therapeutic double bind”. This is a way of using hierarchies of contextual meanings which are inevitable in communication to create paradoxical situations similar to those which were a part of the cause of the patient’s dilemma. The therapeutic paradox, however, is aimed at giving the patient no choice but to begin to move out of his difficulty.

The phenomenon of paradox is central to the conception of how therapy promotes change. paradox, according to Watzlawick, et. al., is “a contradiction that follows correct deduction from consistent premises.” (224) It is possible for a contradiction to follow correct deduction from consistent premises because of the hierarchical nature of the world of form. In mathematics, semantics and human behavioral communication the confusion of the name of the class with the members of that class is basic to the occurrence of paradox. It is, in other words, the result of a confusion of Logical Types.

Consider a classic paradoxical situation. A barber shaves every man in the village who does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself? According to the situation as defined, if the barber shaves himself, he cannot shave himself. If he doesn’t shave himself, then he does. The confusion is in the definition of the situation. The barber is part of the identification of a class of men, i.e., those who don’t shave themselves and are shaved by the barber, and hi is also a member of that class, i.e., when we are discussing how he himself shaves. As we have seen, this doesn’t work. the solution to the paradox is that there can be no such barber.

Now consider the plight of a real barber who is ordered by some authority which he is unable to question to perform as the situation was originally described. This is the interactional model which the “double bind” defines.

Haley, in his book, Strategies of Psychotherapy, (155) which is dedicated to Bateson, analyses hypnosis and several forms of psychotherapy. He endeavors to show that all forms of therapy depend for their effect on putting the patient in some sort of paradox. He uses as a paradigm of this process his analysis of trance induction in hypnosis. Hypnosis is a way of bringing about changes in the subject’s perceptual, interactional and even somatic experience all through communication. It is certainly a focused and powerful way of one person influencing another.

Haley says people are hypnotized by paradox. They are asked to do things voluntarily and are given no choice but to comply. If a subject resists, he is asked to resist. Anything the subject does is defined by the hypnotist as being in service of the hypnosis. the hypnotist takes complete control of all L II questions. He defines the relationship completely. This renders the subject’s usual L II premises irrelevant. When the hypnotist has taken complete control of the definition of the relationship while defining the subject’s participation as voluntary, he asks the subject for involuntary cooperation. “Your eyelids will be heavy, you cannot open them.” “Your arm is to rise by itself.” this is the second phase of trance induction. When the person responds involuntarily to commands, Haley says most hypnotists consider the subject to be in trance.

The paradox is in the multi-leveled aspect of who is in charge. At first the hypnotist is in charge. He enforces the subject’s voluntary cooperation. He enforces this by defining any of the subject’s attempts to be in charge as part of the planned procedure. From this position, he orders the subject to make something happen, to be in charge, but what happens must be involuntary; the subject must not be in charge of it. the subject’s only resolution is to experience what is ordered as happening by itself. This special state of disorientation is called trance.

The subject is caused by the hypnotist to reflect in his patterns of experiencing the same paradox which exists in the pattern of relating between the hypnotist and subject. The subject is in an enforced voluntary relationship with the hypnotist and is asked to experience voluntarily involuntarily (enforced) phenomena. The pattern of the hypnotic relationship isomorphic with the pattern of punctuation induced in the subject. this most important point about the form of the interaction Haley does not consider.

The parallel of this process to that in the Jones family is striking. The paradox is in the structure of the messages in the family. If all is to be consistent, John is to blame, yet John should not do the things which bring blame upon him. He must do them and he must not control doing them. The voluntary vs. enforced nature of this pattern is considerably more difficult to describe because of the complexity of messages which demand and preclude one and the same response. What is important is the fact that the pattern of John’s personal punctuation of relationship is isomorphic with the pattern of interaction in the family. John personally perceives himself not being to blame, but as being caused to be to blame by forces out of his control, in the voices which blame him. His is a mirror image of the family’s punctuation come back to haunt them. The L II premise of the family is that someone (John) is to blame. Their L I premise is that John should not do things that bring blame on him. John’s L I premise is that he only does his best, he should not be blamed. John’s L II premise as reflected both in his voices and in his actions is that he is to blame.

Using the model of hypnosis, which, as we have seen, is formally similar to the interaction of learning patterns in a schizophrenic family, Haley explains psychotherapy as a way of gaining some control over the way a person “classifies” messages. We would say a therapist is able to use paradox to influence a person’s L II premises.

In working with psychotic people one must initially overcome the way in which their evolved patterns of relating deny relationship. Haley discusses several tactics of forcing psychotic patients “voices”, catatonia or whatever, the behaviors which deny that what the psychotic is doing is in response to the therapist are redefined by the therapist. Any evasion is defined as in service of the therapeutic relationship. As in hypnosis, the therapist uses paradox to preclude the patient’s not relating or not cooperating.

...it is necessary to persuade or force the patient to respond in such a way that he is consistently indicating what kind of relationship he has with the therapist instead of indicating that what he does is not in response to the therapist.

With a neurotic, the therapist may attempt to bring about change in the type of relationship consistently formed by the patient. With the schizophrenic, the therapist must require him to form any type of relationship. . . .

When the therapist forces the patient to concede that he is responding to him, no matter what the patient does, the patient can no longer continue schizophrenic symptoms. The further process of therapy is the clarification of what kind of relationship they are having and the encouragement of the patient in searching behavior to learn to define different types of relationship with the therapist (156) (Haley’s emphasis)

The schizophrenic operated on L II premises which are paradoxical or self-denying. All relating is wrong relating. Only non-relating is satisfactory (non-painful) relating. For the schizophrenic the initial therapeutic double bind is a bind at the level of whether or not there will be relationship. One cannot not relate to the command of the therapist and therefore cannot not be in relationship and in one that the therapist is defining. This is an intervention at the level of interactional pattern formation. The therapist offers options to the patient’s relation-denying patterns by thwarting the patient’s ability to deny relating. By placing the patient in an inescapable ongoing relationship, the therapist opens the possibility of reforming L II premises which are consistent. As L II patterns are interactional transforms of L II premises, all relating involves pattern learning. One learns the patterns one is a part of just as one engages in patterns one has learned. The therapeutic intervention is, for the schizophrenic, enforced pattern learning by enforced ongoing relationship.

In the therapeutic relationship the patient is bound to an experience of the process of pattern formation. In the bind is an experiential comment on the fact of hierarchies and paradoxes. That this metacomment must be consciously made so that re-formation of patterns and premises about interaction can begin is doubtful. It is true, however, that people who have been able to comment at this meta-level often have glimpsed the resolution of the inconsistencies of their “who am I” premises in the loss of “I” which can be involved in L III. We will deal with this much more fully later.

Once the therapeutic relationship can be assumed by both therapist and client as an important and ongoing interaction, the form that the interaction will take becomes the central issue of therapy, according to Haley. He sees the therapist, through the paradoxical structure of the therapeutic situation, remaining in control so that the client’s L II premises in regard to several aspects of relating can be violated. This gives the client the possibility of forming new L II premises about that particular aspect of relating. Some of these aspects of relating which he discusses are seen in his subheadings in the chapter describing the basic form which the various therapies have in common: “Domination by the Undominating,” “Dead Serious Play,” “The Benevolent Ordeal,” and “Resistance to Change”. While explaining all of these aspects would require too much space, it seems useful to go through Haley’s discussion of one carefully. In this way one of his discussions can offer us an opportunity for clarifying his approach and adding our own understandings.

Haley sees psychotherapy, with few exceptions, as being labeled a voluntary relationship. Yet the conduct of the relationship is often as if it were not voluntary.

The patient is advised that he is seeking help of his own free will and the success of the treatment depends upon his willingness to cooperate and continue the relationship despite difficulties which might arise. Within that framework of a voluntary relationship, the therapist indicates that the relationship is compulsory by insisting that the patient not miss appointments and defining his attempts to end treatment as resistance to change. From the patient’s point of view, he is being posed a paradoxical definition of the relationship: it is compulsory within a voluntary frame. (157)

Where the relationship is not voluntary, as with many hospitalized people, Haley sees the therapist forcing the relationship only until it can be assumed that it will go on without force. Then the therapist, by such strategies as moving the patient to an unlocked ward or changing to outpatient therapy, begins maneuvers to redefine the relationship as voluntary. Once this is achieved the above description applies.

While Haley’s analysis of this aspect of the therapeutic relationship is concise, he does not relate this analysis to therapeutic change very well. “This issue continues to be central as the patient is continually faced with it throughout treatment. The resolution of the problem is the end of treatment.” (158) He then goes on to show that the same “issue” is reflected in the patient’s lack of clarity as to whether the therapist is voluntarily treating him or is compelled to do so.

At the other end of the relationship, the patient is always somewhat uncertain whether the therapist is seeing him out of choice or as a paid duty - does he choose to see him or is it compulsory? ...The interest and concern of the therapist appears within a framework of a lack of sharing any other aspect of social life together. The patient has difficulty clarifying the interest or disinterest of the therapist and so the voluntary or compulsory nature of the relationship. (159)

Here again Haley offers an analysis which is potentially enlightening but can say only that the patient’s “difficulty clarifying” the relationship raises the voluntary/compulsory issue which is somehow therapeutic.

Finally, Haley relates the voluntary/compulsory issue to the life history of people seeking help. He demonstrates the relevance of the issue, but says nothing of how such life experience leads one to interact in therapy or other situations. A major problem, particularly for psychiatric patients, is whether people associate with them because they wish to or because they must.” (160) This question arises for children in relation to their parents, for parents in relation to their children and for married partners in relation to each other.

In this area resides the problems of dependency, threats of abandonment, and fears of separation. If the issue becomes a major one, a child [or any person in a relationship] might test the definition of the relationship by running away or by creating difficulties to see if his parents [the others in the relationship] really want him. (161)

Using our language we may be able to shed a good deal of light on what is happening in the aspects of relating Haley describes.

People in therapy have often been described as coming from families which are excessively bound together or excessively distant. In these families we can say that at Level II they are not voluntarily together. This message is part of either the idea “we are so close because we cannot be apart” or “we would not be together at all if not bound into being a family by accident of blood.” Within both families the members are treated as if they do what they do because they want to. L I is that what a family member does is his own fault.

The transform of this pattern for any individual’s experience is: L I - “I control what I do, I should do better.” and L II - a symptom or gambit of whatever kind that is involuntary and usually aimed at making certain adjustments in the relationships in the family. Since the relationship is involuntary, strategies which change relating patterns are involuntary.

Therapy reverses this pattern. A patient is not allowed out of the set that this is a voluntary relationship. The L II pattern is one of voluntary relating. The L I pattern is one in which the patient has many demands made on him. Each time the patient does or does not comply with the demands, the meta-massage or L II message is reiterated. He is choosing to comply or not to comply.

The individual transform of this pattern of relationship for the patient gradually comes to be one which makes symptom-free relating possible. The L II premise involved can be stated: “One cannot make relationships happen. They are voluntary for both people. I am voluntarily in my important relationships.” This means that at Level I a person can say, “I have a real right to negotiate how a relationship will be I can have conscious intentionality in relating.”

This same principle holds true for the other aspects of relating involved in psychotherapy. The formal pattern of the therapeutic relationship provides a corrective change in the individual’s pattern of experiencing and participating in relationships. Haley realizes this, though he does not stress it.

The change which occurs in psychotherapy would seem to be discontinuous; although a patient may improve gradually, he appears to change in discontinuous steps. At one moment he is in distress and in ;the next he feels relief. typically he suddenly feels more casual about aspects of his life which were grimly serious to him. . . Usually the patient shows a great flexibility in his strategies with other people. Presumably the shifts in his organized relationships have induced a shift in his classification system. (162) (my emphasis)

Haley’s language, largely derived from Bateson’s work, allows us greater breadth in describing the psychotherapeutic situation by giving the possibility of seeing it as an interactive system. These insights are carried on with only slight revision by Watzlawick, Jackson and Beavins in their discussion of the “therapeutic double bind” (225) and by Watzlawick, Weakland and Fish in their discussion of “reframing” and “second-order change.” (227) Our language, derived from somewhat later work by Bateson offers the possibility of saying more specifically what is happening in the therapeutic relationship and why that would involve change for the client. Our language also offers a way of assessing the limitations of Haley’s .

In hypnosis and psychotherapy the L II questions, the questions of what form the relationship will take are in the hands of the therapist, if Haley’s analysis of several different therapies is correct. The L I premises are in the hands of the client. The client is told, “You decide what to do.” or “Keep doing what you’re doing.” This hierarchy is reflected in the punctuation of the client, most of whose immediate experience remains the same, yet gradually it seems to have different meaning. The therapist is able to intervene through this paradox to make a change in the subject’s L II premises.

It should be pointed out that this isomorphic relationship between the overall pattern of relating and the individual’s punctuation is a necessary feature of systems interacting. A smaller system as it becomes more fully integrated into a larger system, i.e., as it more truly becomes a subsystem, will tend toward this isomorphic state with the form of the larger system. The other side of the systemic coin is that the larger system will be affected in its form by the incorporation of any subsystem. On the level of L II the therapist has offered a set structure for the larger system which will adapt toward integration of the subsystem, i.e., the client, but will maintain its essential structure, inducing restructure in the subsystem. The subsystem of the client’s punctuation is rendered adaptable by the paradoxical set up of the therapeutic relationship which renders the client’s previous L II premises unworkable. the client is in a system in which new punctuation will have to be evolved.

The significant shortcoming of Haley’s analysis, especially when stated in systems terms, is that the therapist as a subsystem, however congruent his punctuation is with the structure of the larger system, should be considered. Haley, the dominant proponent of an interactional point of view, in the last analysis leaves the therapist out. Not only is the therapist as a subsystem not discussed, the tenuousness of the ability of a subsystem to control or structure a larger system once that system is operative is not dealt with. The therapist offers a certain pattern of relating, yet once that system is begun, he has little power to restructure it. He is a subsystem in a larger process. It may not be coincidental that Haley, Watzlawick, Weakland and other therapists who use the “therapist in charge” model practice mostly short term modes of therapy. The longer a system runs, the more it is a product of the totality of its subsystems. The longer a therapist works with a patient, the less the therapist is in charge of the total L II form of the relationship.

In this chapter we have introduced much of the epistemology which is embodied in our language as well as the few terms which are unique to it. In our final restatement of Haley we have begun to use the language to discuss psychotherapy. There has been no clear demarcation between the development and the use of the language generally, as such demarcation is impossible. As we go on discussing psychotherapy, the language will be continually elucidated in the context of its use and so will be in a continual process of development throughout the rest of the work.

In the next chapter we will examine the work of a man who first gave Western therapists consistent access to the restructuring of maladaptive L II premises/patterns: Sigmund Freud. In the following chapter we will return to questions of the whole system of therapeutic interchange and to a possible curative transform of the whole system for the client, Learning III.

FREUD’S PSYCHOANALYSIS: PARALLELS AND PARADOXES

If the language and modes of thinking we have been developing so far are truly useful, they will have their usefulness in the possibility they offer for discussing phenomena which have been previously described extensively in other language systems in ways which are newly illuminating. It would seem that one of the best possible tests of the language would be to compare it to another language, one that is already fairly fully developed and useful to many people to see if our language offers the possibilities we are describing. The most fully developed and widely used language of psychology, psychotherapy and psychopathology is that of psychoanalysis and the most penetrating exposition of it is in the work of Sigmund Freud. In this chapter we will be talking about Freud’s language of therapy; its development, potentials and limitations, all within the understandings derived from Bateson’s work. It will be our thesis that Freud was an observer par excellence of pathology, therapy and human interaction in general, but that he was limited by the intellectual approaches available to him in his ability to build a language which fully did justice to the honesty, depth and accuracy of his observations. In developing this thesis, we will begin with a discussion of Freud’s habits of mind.

Freud, according to Ernest Jones, his most noted biographer, was a man who felt compelled toward philosophical speculation and who thoroughly distrusted this compulsion. He spent several of the early years of his work engaged in the study of the structure of various cells. Only gradually did he evolve away from minute scientific research toward the other end of this spectrum: metapsychology. If Jones is correct, Freud felt a great deal of uneasiness about the direction of his intellectual evolution and constantly looked to the “hard sciences” for an antidote. Though later in his life he was to warn his students away from too much “fascination with endocrinology”, it was a warning he learned to give from his own experience. Everything in his own training had steered him toward such a fascination.

In medical school Freud was most influenced by his teacher Brucke who lived and taught in accordance with a pact he (Brucke) had made with other famous German scientists (of whom the best known is Helmholtz). The pact was that they would endeavor to:

Put into effect his truth: “No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within an organism. In those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces one has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical-mathematical method or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion.” (180) (my emphasis)

Freud was trained in this the best medical tradition in the world when he was becoming a physician. It was a tradition of scientific excellence. He learned, as seen above, that where one encountered an unexplained phenomenon, one always sought for an explanation in terms of “forces” and of “attraction and repulsion.” It was natural, therefore, that later in his career when he encountered the unexplained phenomenon of a cure for hysteria, Freud turned to his earlier training for guidance in developing an explanation. This cure which involved patients talking about events which preceded the onset of their hysterical symptoms, and finally re-experiencing the emotion associated with these traumatic events had been discovered accidentally by Breuer. “It [cathartic abreaction] brings to an end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in the first instance, by allowing its strangulated affect to find a way out through speech.” (107) (my emphasis)

Freud discovered that physical symptoms could be “caused” by memories, by “ideas”. For an explanation of this, he turned to the fundamental laws of the world of substance, the “physical” world. To him ideas must have “forces” in order to have physical effects. Psychoanalysis as an explanatory system was built to explain the fact that ideas can act as forces in people’s bodies as well as their lives. Freud used “energy” and “forces” as a bridge between the fundamentals of science and the behavioral data he observed. Bateson believes that in this he made a fundamental error. He and the other scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should have turned instead to the fundamental laws of form, of “ideas.” “The conservative laws of energy and matter concern substance rather than form. But mental process, ideas, communication, organization, differentiation, pattern, and so on, are matters of form rather than substance.” (66)

In order to relate our language to Freud’s we will begin by following some of the development of his language with particular attention paid to the notion of transference. We want initially to look over Freud’s shoulder as he attempts to clarify his notions of what is happening in the therapeutic interaction. We will gradually insert more and more of our own language into the process so that the correspondence between the two ways of speaking can begin to be built. Where the opportunity arises on other more isolated points to compare ways of speaking, we will take it. Where a paradigm can be used as a small example of the whole correspondence, it will be used.

Later we will examine the analytic situation, using many of Haley’s ways of approaching the structure of therapy. Beyond a building of a correspondence between languages, we will want to use our language as fully as possible to illuminate the ways in which psychoanalysis is helpful in promoting therapeutic change.

In the article, “Hypnotism and Suggestion” (1888) (103), at the beginning of his career in psychology, Freud is already at the crux of the issue he will be wrestling with all his life. He is describing the “connecting link between mental and physiological phenomena of hypnosis. . .” (104) He engages quite honestly the fact that suggestions are both physical and mental. He is candid that consciousness cannot be localized. He seems to generally believe, however, that mental phenomena occur in the cerebral cortex while physical phenomena are products of the rest of the nervous system. Every phenomenon must have a specific cause and a specific place of occurrence.

In discussing the two sides of the issue of the origin of hypnotic trance, he sets out sides very similar to those today on the origin of psychotic phenomena.

One party, whose opinions are voiced by Dr. Bernheim in these pages, maintains that all the phenomena of hypnotism have the same origin: they arise that is, from a suggestion, a conscious idea, which has been introduced into the brain of the hypnotized person by an external influence and has been accepted by him as though it had arisen spontaneously. On this view all hypnotic manifestations would be mental phenomena, effects of suggestions. The other party, on the contrary, insists that some at least of the manifestations of hypnotism are based upon physiological changes, that is, upon displacements of excitability in the nervous system, occurring without those parts of the brain being involved whose activity produces consciousness; they speak, therefore, of the physical or physiological phenomena of hypnosis. (105)

Freud sees this as an either/or situation. He interprets the first point of view, one which looks for an interactive etiology of specific hypnotic phenomena, as demanding the conclusion that therefore all behavior of a patient under hypnosis is caused by the doctor. This would make them random, merely dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the hypnotist. Yet he knows and states emphatically that hysterical phenomena (which are manifested under hypnosis) are governed by laws. He never considers that these laws might be the laws of interaction patterns. He only understands laws in “physical” phenomena, so he has to opt for “displacement of excitability,” for the quasi-physical half of his dichotomy.

In 1904 Freud was clear about what in his therapy was curative, “...The transformation of this unconscious material in the mind of the patient into conscious material must have been the result of correcting his deviation from normality and of lifting the compulsion to which his mind has been subjected.” (111)

Yet bringing the unconscious material into consciousness is difficult. The “bringing of this unconscious material to light is associated with ‘pain’.” (112) So the process is impeded by the patient’s “resistance.” And he continues,

If you succeed in persuading him to accept, by virtue of a better understanding, something that up to now, in consequence of this automatic regulation by pain, he has rejected (repressed), you will then have accomplished something towards his education....Psychoanalytic treatment may in general be conceived of as such a re-education in overcoming internal resistances.” (113) (his emphasis)

Freud was very conscious of the process which we have called “protecting central premises.” That central premises (L II) change slowly, painfully and not at the drop of an interpretative hat, Freud was already very aware. “Resistance” is his term for naming this truth about human change process. Yet in this article he is very fuzzy about what causes someone to overcome this resistance (or in what cases may the person cease to resist). So far he can only speak of “persuading” a person by offering a “better understanding.” This is not very satisfactory, and Freud doesn’t remain with this limited description for long.

By 1910 (114) Freud’s description of how psychoanalysis was curative had evolved toward a more interactional model. The importance of “resistance” in therapy had been centralized and the interaction in the therapy room (“transference”) was given a pregnant but unelaborated mention.

You know that our technique has been transformed in important respects. At the time of the cathartic treatment we set ourselves the aim of elucidating the symptoms, then we turned away from the symptoms to discovering the “complexes,” to use Jung’s indispensable word; now, however, our work is aimed directly at finding out and overcoming the “resistances,” and we can with justification rely on the complexes coming to light as soon as the resistances have been recognized and removed.... The mechanism of our curative method is indeed quite easy to understand; we give the patient the conscious idea of what he may expect to find, and the similarity of this with the repressed unconscious one leads him to come upon the latter himself. this is the intellectual help which makes it easier for him to overcome the resistances between conscious and unconscious. Incidentally, I may remark that it is not the only mechanism made use of by the analytic method; you all know [he is lecturing to analysts] that far more powerful one which lies in the use of “transference.” (115)

In this article Freud mentions the possibility of interactional gain for someone by a flight into neurosis (advantage through illness). He says that when the tenets of psychoanalysis are more generally understood there will be fewer neurotics because the interactional gains from being neurotic will be lessened as a greater number of people understand the dynamics of the disease. He has to admit, though, that in some cases becoming neurotic is the least destructive response people can have given their life situation. The context as a factor in the meaning of symptoms is here recognized to be potentially much more important than intra-psychic process.

In another article in 1910 (116) Freud repudiates the mere naming of the unconscious material as having “as little effect on the symptoms of nervous disease as distributing menu cards in time of famine has on people’s hunger.” (117) Both ill-times interpretation and distributing menu cards for hunger are examples of intervention at the wrong Logical Type.

Since, however, psychoanalysis cannot dispense with making this disclosure to patients, it prescribes that two conditions are to be fulfilled before it is done. First, by preparatory work, the repressed material must have come very near to the patient’s thoughts, and secondly, he must be sufficiently firmly attached by an effective relationship to the physician (transference) to make it impossible for him to take fresh flight again. (118)

Transference here seems to be thought of as that attachment which makes a patient assent to an interpretation of the physician or continue in therapy in the face of realizations which he would otherwise repress.

In his 1912 article, “The Dynamics of the Transference,” Freud begins by describing transference in very similar terms to Bateson’s. He talks about early learned patterns of relating which later are manifested in inappropriate contexts, structuring those contexts in as much as is possible to fit expected “impressions.”

Let us bear in mind that every human being has acquired, by the combined operation of inherent disposition and of external influences in childhood, a special individuality in the exercise of his capacity to love -- that is, in the conditions which he sets up for loving, in the impulses he gratifies by it, and in the aims he sets out to achieve in it. This forms a “cliché” or a “stereotype” in him, so to speak (or even several), which perpetually repeats and reproduces itself as life goes on, in so far as external circumstances and the nature of the accessible love-objects permit, and is indeed itself to some extent modifiable by later impressions. (120) (my emphasis)

In Bateson’s language one might say that habits of punctuating experience (L II) are brought into any context. A “neurotic person might be said to be protecting habits of punctuation which are particularly limiting and usually inappropriate for the context. He therefore must adjust immediate perceptions of the context (in this case the interaction with the therapist) a great deal to fit the patterns which he has come to expect and to act on in interactions. As the relationship with the therapist becomes more and more important, patterns learned early in other important contexts, usually in the context of the family, will be brought to bear. Yet these patterns of relating are not and cannot be conscious to the person (see discussion of L II above).

Freud’s words are:

The peculiarity of the transference to the physician lies in its excess in both character and degree, over what is rational and justifiable -- a peculiarity which becomes comprehensible when we consider that in this situation the transference is effected not merely by the conscious ideas and expectations of the patient, but also by those that are under suppression or unconscious. (121)

When Freud attempts to account, here, as in earlier articles for the way the transference prevents the patient from seeing what is happening in his life which the doctor is describing in his interpretations, he has nowhere to turn but to an “impact of forces” model. Bateson would say that the ways in which L II patterns govern a person’s interaction with the therapist and structure the persons immediate perceptions, are the necessary ways in which an information processing system protects these more general and abstract premises from too precipitous a change. Such a change might destroy the coherence of the whole system by making more abstract premises incongruous with more immediate perceptions. Freud’s account is more visually exciting, but ultimately, less satisfying.

Whenever in our analytic delving we come upon one of the hiding places of the withdrawn libido, there ensues a battle; all the forces which have brought about the regression of the libido will rise up a “resistance” against our efforts in order to maintain the new condition. (122)

Resistance can only be thought of by Freud in terms of forces and impacts, in Newtonian terms, while the following of the “stream of associations” “back” to the most early pathogenic experiences is thought of in obviously special terms. It is an extended elaborate and very comfortably concrete mixed-metaphor. It is reminiscent of the theme of the quest, the journey to goal fraught with opposing forces, obstacles which must be overcome.

In describing how this process of resistance and transference actually occurs in the analytic situation, Freud’s language seems to encompass both the metaphor of the analyst as knight errant riding into the enchanted lands of the patient’s unconscious and a description of the experience which is so finely observed as to be still quite useful today.

Now as we follow a pathogenic complex from its representation in consciousness (whether this is a conspicuous symptom or something apparently quite harmless back to its root in the unconscious, we soon come to a place where the resistance makes itself felt so strongly that it affects the next associations. which has to appear as a compromise between the demands of the resistance and those of the work of exploration. (123)

This “compromise” association which is the expression of the complex as allowed by the “resistance” always takes the form of an association transferred onto the physician. “We conclude from such experiences that this transferred idea is able to force itself through to consciousness in preference to all other possible associations, just because it also satisfied the “resistance.” (124)

Freud is saying that in the psychoanalytic relationship, when a person is expressing an earlier “complex” of feelings and way of relating, he always seems to couch this expression in his way of relating to the therapists. We might describe the whole process by saying that as one moves from an inquiry of a L I idea or bit of behavior toward the earlier learned and more abstract patterns of punctuation, L II, which give it meaning, one moves toward unconsciously enacted patterns or unconsciously experienced premises which must find their manifestation in the interaction between client and therapist. While to someone thinking in Bateson’s terms, this seems perfectly natural, it seemed inappropriate to Freud in 1917. The fact that the therapist must be dragged into the person’s expression of his complexes can only be the work of the “resistance”, and once the therapist (or should we say “knight”) is challenged personally, the battle is joined. “This struggle between physician and patient, between intellect and the forces of instinct, between recognition and the striving for discharge is fought out almost entirely over the transference-manifestations.” (125)

Yet even while he maintains his feeling that the transference is a servant of the resistance and that the analyst is in unending combat with the resistance, Freud is too perceptive an observer and too honest a reporter not to include a final note which seems to confirm our model, that it is only by interacting in his old inappropriate patterns in the therapy situation that the inappropriateness of these patterns can be experienced and options developed.

It is undeniable that the subjugation of the transference-manifestations provides the greatest difficulties for the psychoanalyst, but it must not be forgotten that they, and they only, render the invaluable service of making the patient’s buried and forgotten love-emotions actual and manifest; for in the last resort no one can be slain in absentia or in effigy. (125) (his emphasis)

In the essay on the “On Beginning the Treatment” (1913) Freud begins to talk about manipulating the treatment situation in order to encourage the most helpful transference. He speaks of the necessity of establishing a positive transference before the therapist begins offering interpretations which might be painful to and resisted by the person in analysis. The right kind of transference happens when “...the physician becomes linked up with one of the images of those persons from whom he (patient) was used to receive kindness.” (129)

In or system of speaking we would say that the therapist endeavors to set a context in which the person will respond in the ways he has for interacting in a nurturing, benevolent setting. The therapist attempts to provide a context marker in his behavior which will allow the client to choose from the set of alternatives he has in a nurturing situation. These alternatives or ways of interacting will in all likelihood be those learned very early in life since the nurturing situation is primarily associated with early childhood.

Freud says that the transference is often enough to overcome the symptoms of the disease but that “this is merely temporary and lasts only as long as the transference is maintained.” Real psychoanalytic cure, however, comes only when “the intensity of the transference has been utilized to overcome the resistance.”

We might say that the therapist has originally set a context in which the interaction premises of the client are appropriate. Therefore the blocking, splitting or otherwise structuring of experience to fit a very limited set of premises about relationship is not necessary. Yet this in itself provides no reworking of these premises, no Learning II. It is only in the developing and elaborating of the relationship that old patterns become inappropriate and can be experienced as such. If Bateson is right, that a person’s immediate perception is structured or organized by his L II premises, then this should be even more true of a person’s memory of experiences. A person would remember events in a way that conformed to his present patterns of ordering perception. In cases where the memory of an experience seemed to be not amenable to reconstruction because the most basic nature of the experience contradicted present L II premises, one would expect the experience to be forgotten completely.

This is exactly what Freud describes as happening. In most cases he says the true experience is “repressed” by the substitution of a “screen-memory”, a memory which has been re-worked to leave out painful elements. In only a few cases is the whole experience repressed, though in the early work with hysteria this was thought to be the rule rather than the exception. Should one, however, wish to describe the way early learned patterns of punctuation are involved in later contexts, the term “memory” with its connotation of an event or scene consciously remembered is quite inappropriate. Freud had no other term and lacked the concept of hierarchy in pattern learning, yet he was very aware that what he observed was “memory” of a unique sort. He clearly supports our description of L II premises in their behavioral manifestation as abstract patterns of interaction embodying early-learned experiences of the structure or “rules” of interaction. Transference is simply the attempt by the patient to act on these archaic interaction patterns when they are no longer appropriate in the new context.

...we may say that here the patient remembers nothing of what is forgotten or repressed, but that he expresses it in action. He reproduces it not in memory but in his behavior; he repeats it, without of course knowing that he is repeating.

For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers how defiant and critical he used to be in regard to the authority of his parents, but behaves in that way toward the physician...as long as he is under treatment he never escapes from this compulsion to repeat; at last one understands that it is his way of remembering. (130) (his emphasis)

In speaking about the relationship of transference, repetition compulsion and resistance, Freud says “The greater the resistance the more extensively will expressing in action (repetition) be substituted for recollecting.” (131) We would say that the more abstract the interactional pattern/premises touched in therapy, the more the client’s whole system of premises would be made incoherent by its quick change, the more immediate experiences of interaction will be adjusted to protect this premise/pattern, the more the premise pattern is unconscious, the more it will have to be made manifest in action because it is unconscious and cannot be commented upon. Because these premises are so strongly evoked in a context in which the analyst refuses to participate in the relating pattern in the way that the client expects, the client is able to experience the whole form of his L II premises. This occurs unconsciously at first as in the phenomenon which Freud called “repetition compulsion.” The client acts out his old relating patterns at the very point when he is blocked from remembering experiences of similar relating. In analysis he is able to experience the inappropriateness of these patterns. Gradually as Learning II patterns on which he formerly operated. This is accompanied usually by a rush of memories which could not be remembered earlier. Because L II has occurred, old experiences now “make sense”, i.e., take on coherent form.

Obviously, in its present state, our way of speaking is not as simple or as clear as Freud’s, yet it does not require speaking in terms of reified “things” and “forces” (resistance, compulsion) in conflict, the inadequacy and inconsistency of which we have already discussed. The concrete, tangible nature of Freud’s language invites metaphoric excess, as in the following: “The past is the patient’s armory out of which he fetches his weapons for defending himself against the progress of the analysis, weapons which we must wrest from him one by one.” (132)

In a lengthy article near the end of his career, “Analysis: Terminable and Interminable”, 1937, the great variation in ways of thinking about psychoanalytic “cure” which Freud bright together in what seemed to him a consistent and coherent intellectual approach is very apparent. He unashamedly uses his most quantitative, Newtonian, “impact-of forces” language side by side with his most subtle descriptions of form, context, and meaning in psychoanalytic cure. In this article, Freud’s habits of thought are carried to their most clear and logical ends. Some of the inadequacies of his language can be apparent to us simply by our having access to other ways of thinking about phenomena, but many are apparent only because of Freud’s honest and clarity in setting out his thought and with it the inconsistencies and inadequacies of which he was himself often aware.

In describing the “defensive mechanisms” of the ego in dealing with the instinctual demands of the is, Freud says that the ego mediates between instinctual demands and external reality. To give in to these demands would be to place oneself in a position of opprobrium in relation first to society around one and later to the internalized expectation of society, the super-ego. He invokes the “pleasure principle” as over-all heuristic device in saying that repression and other reworkings of one’s instinctive demands are all done in the service of avoiding “unpleasure.” “The psychical apparatus is intolerant of unpleasure and strives to ward it off at all costs and, if the perception of reality involves unpleasure, that perception -- i.e. the truth -- must be sacrificed.” (139)

Freud believed that this applied equally to one’s perception of “internal” and “external” reality. Freud’s description of this process begins to parallel Bateson’s description Level II premises quite closely.

Moreover these [defense] mechanisms are not relinquished after they have helped the ego through the difficult years of its development. ...the adult ego with its greater strength continues to defend itself against dangers which no longer exist in reality and even finds itself impelled to seek out real situations which may serve as a substitute for the original danger, so as to be able to justify its clinging to its habitual modes of reaction ... The crux of the matter is that the mechanisms of defense against former dangers recur in analysis in the shape of resistances to cure. (140) (my emphasis)

To restate in our language: the premises/patterns of punctuating interaction, L II premises, which one learns early in life continue to structure ones experience of interactions and hence the type of interaction in which one engages, i.e. they continue to be self validating in later life. In therapy the client naturally attempts to structure the interaction to fit his ways of finding meaning, of punctuation.

Freud goes on to say that patients whose analyses go very easily, who achieve facile insight often prove to have achieved less permanent changes than people for whom analysis is much more difficult. We would say that for some people the interactive process of analysis with their specific analyst requires little modification of their L II premises. Their role, vis a vis the analyst is “familiar” in the sense of not being new and in the sense of being similar to family experience. For other people, these specific analytic situations require a change in L II premises in order for them to make sense of what is happening. Freud also knew that the process of an analysis depended on the specific interactive system established between patient and analyst. “Amongst the factors which influences the prospects of an analysis and add to its difficulties in the same manner as the resistances, we must reckon not only the structure of the patient’s ego, but the personal characteristics of the analyst.” (141) (his emphasis)

Here we are still talking in terms similar to “habits of reaction” which Freud used earlier. Freud, however, uses the notion of differences in “adhesiveness of libido” in explaining the phenomenon. He is in a middle ground between explanations involved form and those using substance, and the direction in which he is going for an explanation with which he can be comfortable is unmistakable. “Habits of reaction” is not enough of a “thing” for Freud to stay with for very long.

Finally in dealing with the fact that for some people in diagnostic categories with which analysis has had great success, the therapy makes no difference at all, Freud turns to the training and habits of mind he learned some sixty years earlier.

Nothing impresses us more strongly in connection with the resistances encountered in analysis than the feeling that there is a force at work which is defending itself by all possible means against recovery and is clinging tenaciously to illness and suffering....If we consider the whole picture made up of the phenomena of masochism inherent in so many people, of the negative therapeutic reaction and of the neurotic’s sense of guilt, we shall have to abandon the belief that mental processes are governed exclusively by a striving after pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the existence of a power in mental life which according to its aim, we call the aggressive or destructive instinct and which we derive from the primal death instinct of animate matter. (142) (my emphasis)

Freud, when he was shown beyond any doubt that people will repeat patterns that are familiar to them even when these patterns lead inevitable to pain, found his basic premise that all behavior is motivated by the desire for pleasure or the avoidance of unpleasure shaken at the foundations. He couldn’t see that he had already explained the phenomenon. In his descriptions of the ego’s defending itself against dangers which no longer exist and even seeking out dangers he uses the term “clinging to its habitual modes of reaction.” All he lacks is the concept of a hierarchy of “modes of reaction.” He could then explain why it was more important to maintain one’s habitual modes of reacting (of giving order to experience in interaction) than to simply achieve pleasure or avoid pain in immediate interaction. Freud couldn’t think about the difference between L I and L II.

Lacking the notion of hierarchy in patterns of response, Freud adds to his one major heuristic principle (pleasure) another opposing one (death instinct). While this language is, as we have said earlier, far more developed, more tangible and more easily “experienceable” than ours, it can be seen here that however murky our formulations are, they are fundamentally more elegant than Freud’s. We do not need to compound heuristic devices once the approach is developed.

We have been trying in this chapter to show that Freud’s language for describing what he saw in the therapy he did would have been better served had he available to him some of the concepts developed in the preceding chapter. Now we shall try to use our language to show that the therapy Freud was evolving to help the people he treated can be understood as a gradual refining of the use of paradox.

Haley alone (163) and with Donald Jackson (178) has already described in quite careful detail the paradoxical nature of the formal structure of the analytic relationship as it is practiced today by “classical” analysts. This work is a refining and specifying of some of the approaches presented at the end of the last chapter in discussing psychoanalysis. In the latter article, the authors quote a modern text which outlines the eight absolutely necessary elements in the practice of analysis. After quoting the list which includes regularity of time, recumbent position, complete reliance on free association, etc., they point out:

Granting these condition, and leaving aside whether they can be completely carried out, the question could be raised whether transference responses by the patient to this situation are irrational, inappropriate and regressive, or whether any other type of behavior is possible given these conditions. (179) (their emphasis)

Most of the article is an elaboration of this point. The point is well made and deserves the attention of anyone who wants to see the case clearly stated that what was once understood as intra-psychic phenomena of the patient in therapy can be every bit as sensibly described as interactional phenomena when the therapist is included in the account. The point Haley always fails to emphasize and occasionally overlooks completely is that in order to make sense of the change that the patient experiences, both the interactional and intra-psychic aspects of therapy must be talked about.

In the last chapter we made a first attempt to use Bateson’s language to talk about both intra-psychic and interactional aspects of therapy. We tried to show the formal interaction of the two, that one is a transform of the other. Now we will try to further demonstrate the potential of this language in the context of the therapy of Freud. We will attempt only to show the potential of this approach. An exhaustive treatment would be an enormous task.

We have already dealt at length with Freud’s language about therapy and its development. Now we will try to talk about his technique and the refining of paradox.

Nineteenth Century Europeans and Americans, especially women, often found themselves in a difficult , even paradoxical position regarding their thoughts and feelings. There were many thoughts or feelings, most notably sexual ones, which “good”, “pure”, “righteous” people were not supposed to have. Unfortunately, the prohibition against thinking sexual thoughts enforces an inevitable high level of sexual concern or interest. In the logical structure of the prohibition is a continual concern with these thoughts. The issue is alive as long as the prohibition is in force. Consequently, in families where sexual issues were of greatest concern, children learned the prohibitions most intensely. These children and adults were the most tormented by the inherent paradox in their L II premises. Much of what they inevitably experienced, they had to not experience. Among these were the hysterics Freud and Breuer treated. They were people caught in the same position as the person in hypnosis who is told he is to keep still and his arm is to rise. They developed bodily symptoms outside their control. The symptom served to help resolve the paradox, at least temporarily. It was a way of experiencing and remembering an incident which otherwise could not be experienced or remembered because it did not fit any of the person’s ways of organizing or giving form to experience.

Breuer discovered accidentally that when Anna O. in her self-induced hypnotic state talked through and experienced the emotions of the event just preceding the first appearance of a given hysterical symptom, the symptom disappeared. We have said that “emotion” is the experience of fully participating in a relationship of certain form. It is the internal and interactional signal of certain L II premises being in force. For Anna O. the experiencing of these emotions gave options to the usual paradoxical premises she lived with. She could remember the thoughts and feelings she had had to forget. In her hypnotic state she could experience alternative L II patterns. This allowed a context in which a “repressed” experience could be remembered because it could be given form.

It is possible that this intense anxiety which seemed to be associated with the memory of a repressed incident might be the anxiety of experiencing one’s L II premises to be inappropriate or inconsistent when confronted with a powerful experience to which the hysteric was unable to give meaningful form.

The Initial drawback of Freud’s technique was the use of hypnosis. Anna O. had used an hypnotic state as a frame within which she could experience angry or slovenly thoughts. This was her “condition seconde”, her other state, to which she repaired in the evening and in which she could experience the angers and disappointments of the day. It was her process, not Brier’s. Afterwards she always remembered clearly what had happened. When Freud tried to use hypnosis to the same ends, his results were never quite as complete. The person often did not remember later the experience under hypnosis. They may have experienced L II premises under hypnosis which were more congruent with their Level I experience, but the amnesia later indicated that Learning II had not occurred.

Perhaps the greatest single refinement of Freud’s technique, the most perfect tightening of the paradox for helping the hysterical neurotics he was treating was the introduction of free association. Ernest Jones calls the discovery of free association “a most decisive step in Freud’s scientific life, the one from which all his discoveries emanated.” (181)

One of Freud’s clearest and most complete exposition of free association which he called “the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis” is in the following passage from The Interpretation of Dreams:

As we fall asleep, “involuntary ideas” emerge, owing to the relaxation of a certain deliberate (and no doubt also critical) activity which we allow to influence the course of our ideas while we are awake....As the involuntary ideas emerge they change into visual and acoustic images. In the state used for analysis of dreams and pathological ideas, the patient purposely and deliberately abandons this activity and employs the psychical energy thus saved (or a portion of it) in attentively following the involuntary thoughts which now emerge, and which -- retain the character of ideas. In this way the “involuntary” ideas are transformed into “voluntary” ones. (108) (his emphasis)

For a 19th century hysteric, Freud is prescribing the symptom. He orders the person to have involuntary thoughts, any thoughts, no matter how repulsive. If the person attempts to operate consistently with the L II premises he has been operating on, if he screens out bad thought, he is violating the “fundamental rule” of the treatment. While anything the person says is acceptable, his old ways of classifying messages and relationships are rendered inoperable. He has to develop new L II patterns if he is to remain in therapy.

Psychoanalysis developed into a broader more comprehensive technique as Freud worked with a wider range of neurotic people and their symptoms. The development of the notion of transference shows Freud’s gradual incorporation into the treatment of more and more forms of patients’ behavior. Not only was anything a person said, no matter how abhorrent in other contexts, taken to be part of the prescribed treatment, gradually any behavior which the patient showed toward the analysts definition of them as transference, a necessary period of acting archaically on the way to recovery.

The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive force for remembering, consists in the handling of the transference. We render it harmless, and even make use of it, by according it the right to assert itself within certain limits. We admit it into the transference as to a playground, in which it is allowed to let itself go in almost complete freedom and is required to display before us all the pathogenic impulses hidden in the depth of the patient’s mind. If the patient does but show compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis we can regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the neurosis a new transference-coloring, and in replacing his whole ordinary neurosis by a “transference-neurosis” of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work. (133)

We will offer here only one further elaboration on Freud’s technique. It is another step toward refining and specifying the paradoxical situation to make it most appropriate to specific people. In his article, “Turnings in the Ways of Psychoanalytic Treatment” in 1919 he described one of the “new developments toward which our therapy is tending.” He is speaking about the best treatment for compulsives. “I think there is little doubt that here the correct technique can only be to wait until the treatment itself has become a compulsion, and then with this counter compulsion forcibly to suppress the compulsion of the disease.” (135) The symptom becomes the treatment. It is perfect paradox.

As we will discuss at much greater length in the next chapter, Freud in his writing about therapy was concerned solely with L II issues. He was attempting to help the patient bring more and more of his unconscious fantasies and repressed experiences into the conscious sphere of the “ego”. Patients who did not have an “ego” that could be reworked in analysis, i.e. psychotic patients, were not good candidates for his therapy, though he hoped that someday his therapy would be extended to this group. In Chapter V we will see how John Rosen used Freudian personality theory to explain the effectiveness of his therapy for schizophrenics, but had to violate most of the basic rules of analytic practice to be effective with these patients.

Freud’s therapy had several distinct characteristics from our point of view.

1. Level II premises of the client as they are manifested in patterns of communication were rendered inoperable through the uses of free association.

2. Level II patterns of interaction which the patient was used to fostering were precluded in the interaction between patient and analyst by the structure of the interaction and by the analysts avoidance of “countertransference” feelings or acting out. All behavior of the patient to restructure the relationship is defined as part of the treatment.

3. Level II premises of the client were forcefully invoked in the powerful (i.e. parental) stance taken by the analyst toward the patient.

4. In the acting out of his L II premises in the paradoxical structure of the analytic situation, where all behavior of the cure to be learned about but no behavior gave one control of the situation, a patient could experience the whole form of his L II pattern.

5. In the promotion of insight into the form of one’s abstract patterns of interaction was paradigm of the L II premises inherent in the analytic situation, premises which the patient thus gradually came to adopt in place of his inappropriate (pathogenic) ones.

Point #5 certainly requires an elaboration. Freud had no method nor inclination to describe the L II premises inherent in the analytic situation. When he did describe these premises he spoke only in intra-psychic terms. The change to be brought about in analysis was the bringing into the conscious realm of the ego the unconscious fantasies of the id. In this way one’s unconscious wishes could be accepted without either being acted upon or overly reacted to (by one’s repressive super-ego). One could have rational control over one’s life. Insight is a paradigm of this model in that it “control” over a pattern through meta-comment on the pattern.

This model of cure through the understanding and accepting of one’s unconscious wishes is a metaphor in intra-psychic terms for the L II premises fostered by the analytic situation. The analyst is in the position of the ego. He encourages all of the early-learned interaction patterns of the patient and accepts them all. He is not judgmental because he is not defensive. None of these patterns has power over him. He has complete personal integrity throughout the process. Insight puts the client in the analysts role vis a vis his own patterns.

It should be remembered that in learning the abstract (L II) form of an interaction a person learns the form of the whole interaction. It was stated earlier that this is evolutionarily necessary for an organism as complex as human beings so that an adult can know how to be a parent having only experienced the interaction in the role of a child. It is far too complex a task to be left to trial and error.

In analysis over a period of time a patient learns (L II) the form of the whole interaction. When he leaves the analytic situation these L II premises, largely unconscious, offer an approach to life in which one can take the position of the analyst in relation to one’s own sexuality and relation to other people. One can be accepting, non-judgmental, and ultimately not controlled by one’s urges or the gambits of others. One can have person integrity.

In the next chapter we will discuss the way in which the ultimate integrity of the self, the ego, may leave one in a paradoxical position at a still higher level of abstraction. For now we will say that Freud offered freedom from their continuous need to keep their minds “clean”, from their need to deny the highly sexual nature of their experience. He gave them a way of accepting their repressed fantasies and experience without having to “give in” to them. He fostered a person’s being able to control his life. This was no small gift for the driven people he worked with.

In this chapter we have tried to delineate the habits of mind embodied in Freud’s language so that his language could be clearly and effectively used as a contrast to our own. Since a language is a epistemology in operation, it was necessary to trace the development of Freud’s epistemology as we traced the development of his language about psychotherapy. In tracing the development of his therapeutic technique. This meant we had an opportunity to use our own language to understand his therapy. A language and epistemology, if they are to be truly useful, will offer fresh access to the familiar. We hope in our discussion of Freud that this has been the experience of the reader.

FREUD, BINSWANGER AND LEARNING III

One of Freud’s students and close friends was also one of the most incisive critics of what we have to this point been labeling the “impact of forces” aspect of Freud’s model of human personality and of psychotherapeutic change. Ludwig Binswanger, the founder of the existential school of psychoanalysis, “Daseinanalysis,” said that his teacher had failed to take into account the most fundamental aspect of what it is to be human. While we have criticized Freud’s language for not being parsimonious in that it needs to compound “basic principles” in order to explain a phenomenon such as “repetition compulsion,” we have only hinted in the vaguest way that his language might leave some basic part of human experience undiscussed. In Binswanger’s criticism of Freud, we have a critique of this limitation to which we also must answer.

In this chapter we will try to give a summary of Binswanger’s criticism of Freud and to refine and extend our own language in the light of these ways of understanding. We will also attempt to show the relationship of Binswanger’s approach to our own, though there will not be the attempt to “translate” his language into ours as was done in our chapter on Freud. His language provides a contrast to our own. In seeing the different potentials of the two languages we will have our first clear picture of the limits of our own language. In our understanding what our language cannot do, we will be on firmer ground in using it for what it can do.

The critique of Freud by Binswanger with which we will be concerned is entitled “Freud’s Conception of Man in the Light of Anthropology.” (72) It was composed as a commemorative address on the occasion of Freud’s eightieth birthday. We will follow the argument of Binswanger’s essay rather closely before beginning our discussion of its relation to the rest of our language system.

Binswanger says that the impetus for a coherent body of scientific work is its basic “idea.” To him the word is a much larger one than it is usually taken to be. Far more than a “notion” of an “original thought,” it is to him a unique confluence of culturally and historically specific modes of apprehending and ordering the phenomenal world which in the unfolding experience of a specific person are made into a new form. “The idea behind a scientific work combines the unique personal-psychological and cultural-historical conditions that made it possible with the timeless mission it has to accomplish in and for the world, namely, the service of Truth.” (73)

An “idea” in Binswanger’s sense is generative form. It gives new apprehension of the world, new understanding, new congruence between formally incongruous experience, new refinement of perception, new meaning.

The idea behind the work of Freud, according to Binswanger, is a conception of man which Binswanger calls “homo natura”. It is an idea of “primal man.” Because it is an idea, we are not talking about an historical “primal man, whether we speak of philogenetic history of the species or of the onto genetic history of an individual from “primal” infant to adult. “This primal man is not the source and fount of human history, but is, instead, a requirement for natural-scientific research.” (74) Freud’s idea is born of and is generative within a specific realm of thought.

The reductive dialectic used by Freud to construct his theory of man is, to the last detail, that of natural science. In it, his faith that he is discovering something about the reality of the world finds its proper support, and with it his sense of awe before the mystery and power of life tirelessly spurs his work forward. Freud was not one to limit his concern merely to the direct object of his investigations without at the same time being profoundly self aware of the intellectual tool that was his method. He himself has given us an excellent description of its most essential prerequisites. He speaks of seeking identity between differences. Psychoanalytic investigations show “that the deepest essence of man is instinctual impulse, whose elemental nature is the same in all men and which directs him to the satisfaction of certain primal needs.” (75)

This search for identity beneath differences, for the common causes, leads the natural scientist to pay attention to observed phenomena only when these may lead to some more fundamental force. As Binswanger puts it, “Natural science never begins with just the phenomena; indeed, its main task is to divest the phenomena of their phenomenality as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.” Freud says it only slightly differently: “In our method, observed phenomena must take second place to forces that are merely hypothesized.” (76)

This is a natural scientific knowledge, and to Freud it is the only knowledge. It consists, in Freud’s words, of “the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.” Binswanger points out that the intellectual manipulation of discrete bits (observations) limits one to a certain kind of knowledge.

We can now characterize the idea of homo natura more precisely by saying that it is a genuine natural-scientific, biopsychological idea. It is a natural-scientific construct like the biophysiological idea of the organism, the chemist’s idea of matter as the underlying basis of the elements and their combinations, and the physicist’s idea of light, etc. The reality of the phenomenal, its uniqueness and independence is absorbed by the hypothesized forces, drives and the laws that govern them. (77)

Binswanger carefully sets out the elements of Freud’s conception of man, its foundation in “bodiless,” the role of the instincts in translating bodily needs into psychical ideas and then into action, the notion of the “wish” as the form taken by instinct in the psyche, the mechanism of repression in response to the constraints of civilization as translated through the family, and the operation of transference in psychotherapy in correction of pathogenic repression. He has the greatest respect for many of Freud’s contributions made possible by this conception of man. Of Freud’s relating of certain motives and behaviors with certain regions of the body, he says, “It was Freud who first gave us a genuine somatography of experience based on natural-scientific observations and constructs. This is an accomplishment whose anthropological significance cannot be sufficiently highly esteemed.” (78) (His emphasis)

Binswanger has high regard for the elegance of Freud’s mechanistic view of man. He quotes from The Interpretation of Dreams Freud’s formula for the action of the derivatives of unconscious material in consciousness. “It is as though the resistance of consciousness against them [the ‘derivatives’] were a function of their remoteness from what was originally repressed.” Of this Binswanger says:

No one at all familiar with the problems he dealt with can fail to realize what an enormous concentration of scientific research and thought was required before even one sentence in the language of mathematical functional equations could be formulated concerning the psychic life of human beings. . . . One might even formally express Freud’s whole life work by stating that the idea of homo natura can lead to the possibility of expressing psychic processes in a mathematical functional equation. Freud succeeded in demonstrating mechanism at work in what was apparently the freest reaches of the human mind, thereby creating the possibility of mechanically “repairing” the mind (with the psychoanalytic techniques of unmasking and annulling repression and regression by means of the transference mechanism). * (79)

*Binswanger makes a reversal in this statement. He seems to say that the possibility for an effective therapy came from Freud’s model of man when the opposite is true. Freud’s model began as a natural-scientific explanation for the effectiveness of his therapy, though as his career went on each informed the other. “The main result of our investigation has been to establish that Freud’s idea of homo natura is a scientific construct that is only feasible if it is based on a destruction of man’s experiential knowledge of himself--a destruction, that is, of anthropological experience.” (80) (his emphasis)

The word “anthropological” is pivotal here and requires some discussion. It is an important word for Heideggar which Binswanger appropriates. Ernest Angel, a translator of Binswanger, gives a good brief description of it.

Binswanger uses this word not in its usual American meaning, which is cultural anthropology, the comparative study of races, mores, etc., but rather in its strictly etymological sense, that is, anthropology as the study of man (“anthropos”) and specifically ... the study of the essential meaning of and characteristics of being human. (70)

Anthropology is a superior science of which Freud’s natural scientific approach to human beings can only be a part. The Freudians would claim a primary status for their approach is the argument Binswanger seeks to counter. He points out that the homo natura model can be helpful to anthropology in that it shows how much can be accomplished by a unified intellectual approach to human beings. He welcomes whatever amount of human experience “mechanism” is able to subsume for this leaves what is left more firmly in the camp of “freedom”. He appreciates the way in which natural science offers unitary morphological principles to be found throughout the differences between individuals or in forms taken by a single individual, but sees this as only half an understanding of the phenomena.

In Freudian “doctrine”, the main stress is placed not upon existence as change, but upon that which persists and remains amid change, the instinct. But anthropology must attend to both the unitary primal form within change and the multiplicity of change as genuine metamorphosis. (81)

This commitment to fundamental morphological principles, to hypothesized forces or drives unchanging throughout seeming changes robs human beings of their “being” in any particular space and time. Heideggar’s “Dasein,” “being there,” is inherently contextual and this is unaccounted for in natural science. But there is “something,” according to Binswanger, which continually bursts the bounds of natural sciences. In the subject-object split implied by natural science and the subsequent slavish attention to the object, there is always one element “bracketed out”.

Limiting ourselves to Freud, we need only open one of his works at random to come upon this “something.” We see him, for example, writing of the construction and operations of our psychic apparatus, or our psyche as that precious instrument by means of which we maintain our lives; we see him writing about our psychic life, our thoughts. With all these possessive pronouns, what is being spoken of is a being that is presupposes as self-evident and that is just as self-evidently being bracketed out, namely, existence as ours. (82) (his emphasis)

In most psychological terminology the “self” is a rather small objectified entity which is somehow owned, as in the term “my-self”. This has the same sort of status as “Id,” “Ego,” or “Super-ego,” a reified entity developed according to certain hypothesized laws. For Binswanger the “self” is closely linked with the “existence” which is any one person. Binswanger’s “self” is the have-er and the had, the being that says “my” in “myself”, the existence which makes “having” and “had” meaningful. While natural science “leads away from ourselves towards theoretical determinations, i.e., to the perception, observation and destruction of man in his actuality,” anthropology provides another way, a way “which concerns itself with the conditions and potentialities of the Dasein as ours, or--what comes to the same thing--that concerns itself with the possible kinds and modes of our existence.” (83) (his emphasis)

Anthropology, by offering a way of comprehending the modes of human existence, offers to the scientist a fundamental approach so often unutilized, the approach to an understanding of “scientist” as a mode of human existence. Taking this approach offers an understanding of being as “scientist,” as “seeker,” “shaper,” and as “spokesman for scientific truth in and for the world.” And as one understands a specific existence in its world, a particular mode of being which is a mode of constituting “world” in the apprehension, the seizing and giving form to presenting phenomena, all in a certain fashion or according to a certain “idea”, one gains a step toward the elucidation of the “operation” and “structure” of “being” itself. so rich an approach is taken by few scientists, perhaps because in what they gained they would also seem to lose. To avowedly approach “scientist” as a mode of being is tacitly to acknowledge that there are other, equally valid modes of being. Human being may be scientific, artistic, religious, etc., each with its own forms of reason and with its own access to truth. A scientist who understands the interactional nature of his mode of existence, who has insight into his ways of knowing, as well as what is “known”, can no longer claim primacy for scientific knowledge.

Each of these modes of apprehending being represents an essential form of human existence. When one form takes on the role of judge over all the others, then the essence of man is leveled or reduced to one plane. Even though, therefore, the picture of man formed by natural science encompasses all regions of human being, it is unable to give unmediated articulation to the intellectual and linguistic forms peculiar to these regions and is thus unable to express the way man lives within each of these regions. (84)

Natural science cannot give unmediated articulation of these regions because it seeks both distance and depth. It seeks distance from its object, to be “objective” in its approach to phenomena, and it seeks to plumb the depths of structures and forces which underlie the phenomena. Others modes of apprehending being, particularly the artistic and religious modes can more closely approach “unmediated articulation” in these areas. In talking about science, art, ethics, and religion Binswanger seems to use the terms “modes of apprehending being,” “forms of existence,” and “forms of reason” interchangeably.

They are types and modes in which the Dasein exists, and in which it understands, interprets and expresses itself. The fact that all these forms of existence are possible reveals to us the historicity of the human Dasein; their actual realization reveals its history . . . As far back as 1883 Dilthey wrote: “. . . The individual always experiences, thinks, and acts within a historically conditioned communal sphere.” This is but a corroboration of what we already knew, namely, that the construction of every scientific picture of man must begin with a destruction of his historicity, i.e., with that which man, as historical Dasein in the “:structural context” of experience, expression, understanding, and meaning, can objectify. (85) (his emphasis)

Here Binswanger’s language seems to parallel our own. “Structural context” is a term for all the important elements in the “historicity” of each person. Thus, man inevitably encounters a world “laden with meaning.” This is his “structural context of experience, expression, understanding and meaning.” Yet only that which can be stripped of meaning, reduced to its “components” and finally reassembled to form some new meaning, i.e., that which can be treated “objectively,” can be approached by natural science.

By “historicity” in the above quotation Binswanger means the ability of the existence to elaborate its own coherent form through time in the interaction with its “meaning environment.”

Binswanger’s critique of Freud’s scientific point of view is not only thoroughgoing, it is also loving. He finds Freud’s own person and history an eloquent expression of the aspects of human existence which were lacking in Freud’s intellectual system. (Freud was flattered, honored and unconvinced when he read the essay shortly after it was delivered.)

Binswanger’s life’s work might be said to have been the apprehending of modes of existence of people otherwise described in terms of mechanistic pathology (psychosis and neurosis) through his use of the work of Heidegger in illuminating the processes and structures of “being” in its most general sense, and then attempting to explain this work to others. In this attempt he borrows from Heidegger a language which is hardly translatable into English, much less into another language system such as ours. In an incredible work of power and intricacy of thought Heidegger attempted to delineate the phenomenological structure of being, or in his phrase, “being-in-the-world.” (166) To do this he had to vivify and even generate whole language structures, at least for the English speaking reader. He wrote rather lengthy book in an attempt to reclaim the potential meaning and resonance of just one word: “being.” (167) In Being and Time he used at least five different rigorously conceptualized words to express the differences of meaning which are unwittingly lumped under the word “history” in English. Most of the nuances and shadings of Heidegger’s language are understood and intended by Binswanger as he applied the language to his existential analytic studies.

In the richness, complexity and difficulty of Heidegger’s and Binswanger’s language when compared to the rather straight-forward clarity of Freud’s language is an example of the difference which the logical type from which one approaches human beings makes. Binswanger maintains that Freud misjudged the logical type from which he is able to speak. Freud would have his natural scientific point of view be the most fundamental explanatory outlook possible on human being. Binswanger says that in fact Freud’s approach is merely one mode of existence among several equally primary possibilities. This may seem to be the efforts of a pupil simply going his teacher one better by claiming to have a meta-view to his teacher’s view, but one should understand that Binswanger’s is fundamentally less arrogant than Freud’s. Binswanger stays always within the phenomenological mode. This means that he always has before him the knowledge that one can never learn about the human situation or human experience from outside it. The subject-object, knower-known relationship is ultimately inappropriate in this case, however much it may facilitate knowing in certain areas. Binswanger, with the language of Heidegger, is able to illuminate aspects of human existence which Freud cannot approach because he (Binswanger) has a humbler but more accurate assessment of what is possible. The difficulty of Binswanger’s language reflects the complexity of speaking within the phenomenological mode without the simplifying objectivity of natural science.

In the title of this chapter we listed Binswanger and Learning III together as if there were some sort of comparability between Binswanger’s critique of Freud and the understanding implied by Bateson in the concept of L III. This implication is certainly intended, yet in order to say how they are comparable, we will need to first go a bit more deeply into L III.

In speaking about L II in Chapter II we claimed that the specific interaction patterns in the psychotherapeutic situation provided a corrective change in the habits of punctuating relationships of the client. We identified the formal structure of these patterns as L II patterns which found their transform in L II premises of the client. We further said that the L II premises brought by the client to the therapeutic situation were mostly transforms of L II patterns of his family early in life. We said that this was necessary systems phenomenon, that elements capable of learning in an ongoing informational system must eventually come to embody some transform of the formal structure of the system as a whole. L II is an example of the same systemic phenomenon at one greater level of abstraction.

Every person has Level III premises whether or not he has ever achieved the change of these premises which we would call Learning III. Level III premises are formal transforms of the most abstract patterns of relationship embodied in the culture as a whole. The Level III premises of most people born in Western culture are transforms of a basically purposive approach to “environment” which is embodied in the culture. Bateson has written extensively about the personal and ecological consequences of a culture in which the immediate purposes of man, singly or collectively, are determinants of so many actions. (8, 38, 43, 46, 60, 62, 63) One of the clearest and most enjoyable statements of this point of view is in Bateson’s reworking of a very familiar story.

There was once a Garden. It contained many hundreds of species--probably in the subtropics--living in great fertility and balance, with plenty of humus, and so on. In that garden there were two anthropoids who were more intelligent that the other animals.

On one of the trees there was a fruit, very high up, which the two apes were unable to reach. So they began to think. That was the mistake. They began to think purposively.

By and by, the ape, whose name was Adam, went and got an empty box and put it under the tree and stepped on it, but he found he still couldn’t reach the fruit. So he got another box and put it on top of the first. Then he climbed up on the two boxes and finally he got the apple.

Adam and Eve then became almost drunk with excitement. This was the way to do things. Make a plan, ABC and you get D. They then began to specialize in doing things the planned way. In effect, they cast out from the Garden the concept of their own total systemic nature.

After they had cast God out of the Garden, they really went to work on this purposive business, and pretty soon the topsoil disappeared. After that, several species of plants became “weeds” and some of the animals became “pests”; and Adam found that gardening was much harder work. He had to get his bread by the sweat of his brow and he said, “It’s a vengeful God. I should never have eaten that apple.” (39) (his emphasis)

The myth tells both the story of the beginnings of an essentially purposive culture and of the purposive approach to the world which would be natural to the members of the culture. Conscious purpose inevitable requires a subject-object split. I (subject) do so and so (verb) to that (object). It is likely that the development of language had some role in the evolution of this purposive culture as digital language is essentially purposive. That conscious purpose and language are inextricably linked can be seen in any noun. A hammer is only a “hammer” in as much as it has a role in a purposive system. Otherwise it is steel and wood in a very arbitrary configuration. All naming is the assumption of power over the thing named. It is not accidental that the God of the Hebrews had several names by which “He” was known but that no one could say the true name of God. to “take the Lord’s name in vain” is to assert one’s power over deity.

The language that one is forced to use in Western culture has the purposive nature of the culture firmly embedded in it. This language forces conceptualizing which is inherently paradoxical. Whenever someone say, “I”, he is in paradox. He is a member of a class describing the class as a whole. When “I” is used strictly in its denotative significance, when it only signifies that what is said is about the person speaking, the paradox is not carried through in the rest of the sentence. However, when “I” is connotative, when it has specific descriptive sorts of overtones of the speaker, the paradox is more apparent when some of the other ways we express ourselves are highlighted. “Ourselves,” for instance, is an example. Anyone who says “I”, can say “myself”, yet which is the being that owns this self? The term implies two entities, an owner who says “my” and a “self” which is owned. All people in Western culture who use their language with no sense of being somehow violated by its most usual structures are in the same position as Freud with respect to Binswanger’s critique. He said that Freud bracketed out the being who was the subject in phrases like, “our psyche” or “our consciousness”. The being that says “I”, “myself”, etc., is bracketed out of all Western language. “I” as it is usually used is a concept, not an experience. The experience of being, which is the experiencing being, is lost. Even the language we must use to describe the loss process is overly tangible as we speak of “splitting” or losing “half” the person. No language does justice to human being as process and none can describe the injustice of conventional language.

We have spoken of L II premises as being those unconscious early-learned habits of punctuating interaction into meaningful sequences which are best named by descriptions of “character”. “ person is “dependent,” “aggressive,” “happy,” “a true _________________ (fill in family or religious name)”, etc. these are all descriptions of L II constellations. The search for identity is a search for clarity of and perhaps a name for ones L II premises.

A great emphasis on L II premises is natural in a purposive culture. Where there is a clear subject and object distinction, both require extensive definition. So in a purposive culture, People may have intense definition. So in a purposive culture, people may have intense concern with “who” they are because they each are a discrete definable entity set apart from their environment, These extensive L II structures all are embedded in a paradoxical L III set of premises.

Learning III would be a corrective change in the usual Level III premises of people and the culture. It involves any increasing of the facility for corrective change in L II premises. A person increases his ability to have options of L II premises as the unconscious definitions of his character become less fixed. This is movement toward more comfortably standing within the system that is a person in his environment rather than constituting purposive systems of which one is the definor. It is ceasing to embody the highest logical type in one’s experiential world.

The fact that we are contracting standing within the system to a purposive approach to one’s environment does not have specific definitions of one’s “self” to protect or specific purposes to impose on one’s environment, one is able to experience one’s agency in the larger system much more clearly. One can more completely be what one is doing because one is not bound to a particular definition of the doer (oneself). At the most abstract level it may be possible to experience one’s agency in the immediate interaction of the creation of form and meaning that is perception.

The manner in which L II premises can structure and limit perception highlights the interactive nature of perception itself. It is the sense that the perceiver has of himself which is being protected by the limitation of perception. Perception is restricted because greater complexity of perception is a transform of greater complexity of perceiver.

In speaking about L III we have spoken of a corrective change at Level III allowing a return to “immediate” perception. This is not meant to imply that Learning III allows one to perceive in ways which have no redundancy. It means that one is able to return to the interaction of perception with premises about perception which do not have to be rigidly protected, which can evolve and which are complex enough to allow for a great complexity of perceiving. This is the direction of the gain as one moves toward a non-paradoxical stance at Level III.

What is the experience of functioning with non-paradoxical L III premises? Watzlawick, et. al., in talking about Level III, try to approach the existentialist’s language. “Only from this level can it be seen that reality is not something objective, unalterable, “out there,” with a benign or sinister meaning for our survival, but that for all intents and purposes our subjective experience of existence is reality--reality is our patterning of something that most probably is totally beyond objective human verification.” (226)

When a communication theorist who has a language to talk about human interaction tries to use that language to articulate human being, the results are usually inadequate. We can talk very well about patterns and patterns of patterns, but when we seek to stand within human existence-in-environment, as Watzlawick does, we still find ourselves talking about it. He denies “objective” viewpoints, but can only affirm the opposite of the same logical type: “subjective”. This, incidentally, is ever the problem that Humanism encounters. In its countering of the evils of science and objectivity it offers only the often laughable opposite.

For a language which can offer an alternative to the subject-object dichotomy, we must turn back to the phenomenological mode. Here is an understanding of non-paradoxical L III premises which Bateson’s language can point to, can, as it were, describe the logical structure of but cannot nearly adequately articulate.

Binswanger in speaking of how we can know without objectifying says we must let the thing “speak for itself,” express itself “as it is”.

However, the “as it is” contains one more fundamental ontological and phenomenological problem; for we finite human beings can acquire information on the “how” of a thing only according to the “world design” which guides our understanding of things. Therefore, I have to return once more to Heidegger’s thesis of the existence as “being in the world.” ...What I want to emphasize here is only the identification of being-in-the-world and transcendence; for it is through this that we can understand what “being-in-the-world” and “world” signify in the anthropological application. The German word for transcending is Uberstieg (climbing over or above, mounting). An Uberstieg requires, first, that toward which the Uberstieg is directed and, secondly, that which is uberstiegen or transcended; the first, then, toward which the transcendence occurs, we call “world,” whereas the second, which is transcended, is the being itself (das Seiende selbst)* and especially that in the form of which a human existence itself “exists”. In other words, not only “world” constitutes itself in the act of transcending--be it as a mere dawn of world or as objectifying knowledge--but the self also does so, (71)

While Bateson’s language is as impoverished as most when compared to Binswanger’s in the discussion of the phenomenological structure of being, pathology and therapy, we can

_____________________

· Seiend is a noun which can be translated as “a being” and has elsewhere been rendered by the constructed word “essent.” (168) It is “that which is,” “that which manifests itself in being (sein)”.

use his language to talk about what Binswanger is doing. By using the phenomenological mode, Binswanger is standing within the process he describes. The process he describes is of a higher logical type than his descriptions of it. This is a reversal of the usual relation of language to what is spoken of and partly explains the necessity for such a great concern with language which both Binswanger and Heidegger show. Binswanger is refusing to assert his view as the highest logical type in his phenomenal in his phenomenal world as is implied in the subject-object approach to phenomena. His approach is “non-objectifying.” It should be remembered that this is not the opposite of “objectifying,” not “subjectifying,” it is of a completely different logical type.

That Bateson’s language, built from the study of form is so close to, we might say isomorphic with Binswanger’s in the crucial area of man’s relation to his world, may be because Bateson, as any good systems theorist would, always took his own theorizing into account as part of the system. In any one instance, for example, in discussing schizophrenia, the role of the “discusser” may not be mentioned, yet, because in other contexts the formal relation of human knowing to what is known has been carefully attended to (Chapter II above) and the formal relationship between human knowing and schizophrenia carefully elucidated ultimately the subject-object split is not invoked. But though it is a system which attempts to account for the theorizer and the phenomena together in a coherent whole, it does not possess the phenomenological immediacy of Heidegger and Binswanger. It is a language about experience rather than a language of experience. We can go on with our system, knowing we are doing no violence to the existential point of view, but knowing also that where Learning III is taking place, it is more likely that a language similar to that of the existentialists will be used. Our language will be useful in saying what is happening there, in taking the meta-view.

This point has great significance for our discussion of different forms of therapy. Learning III is promoted by a language like Binswanger’s, a language which stands within the ongoing process of unfolding human being. Learning III is fostered by a language which helps call into question the subject-object split, rather than assuming it. It would probably be a language which was elliptical, sometimes turning back on itself to give a sense of the false assumptions embedded deep within its structure, yet without jumping to the meta-view. By refusing to take the meta-view and talk about how thing’s “really” are, the language would force the staying at the logical type of experience, forcing the user toward an experience of his own position within the system in the room and in his “world.”

Whether or not Learning III is promoted in a given therapy situation, assuming the client comes to the situation with the usual L III premises of the culture described above, is probably contingent on the therapist’s L III premises as reflected in his premises with reference to therapy. These would in all likelihood be expressed in whether the therapist feels himself to be standing within a larger process in the room to which he can only contribute his best and by which he also will be affected. A belief in some innate curative force in the patient is probably a transform of this same basic approach. It means that the therapist can do his best to facilitate change, but in the end is not the causes of change. Change is a product of the total systemic interaction among the people in the therapy situation. This attitude which might foster L III is not necessarily a stated attitude by the therapist. It must be embodied in the most abstract structure of the therapeutic interaction.

It is obvious that the therapist’s most basic approaches to other people as reflected in the therapeutic situation are not the only expression of L III premises encountered in therapy. Issues of voluntary vs. involuntary therapy, the institutional context, and whether or not there is money paid for therapy, while they are largely to be negotiated in the Level II interaction of the therapy because they pertain to the form of the specific relationship in the specific situation, have embedded in them abstract assumptions about relating in general which will effect the L III patterns of the interaction. What exactly those assumptions are or “institutional” structures could reflect less paradoxical L III premises is a question too complex for a general treatment. Some religions of the East would consider all these considerations as part of the webs of maya that make up most of our social and political lives. Maya is defined by Alan Watts as “the Hindu-Buddhist word whose exact meaning is not merely >illusion’ but the entire world conception or culture, considered as illusion in the strict etymological sense of a play (Latin, ludere).” (219) For the time being, we can say that whatever the most abstract formal implications of the contextual conditions to the therapeutic relationship, it is likely the experience of options within these structures can best be reflected in a therapeutic relationship whose most abstract premises are not exactly isomorphic with those of the context. This could be possible in the existential clarity and compression which is in the nature of the relating of two people and which is different from the more amorphous relationship of one person to his “contextual world”. In the process which is relating is a possible clarifying of “being”. It can be experienced that there must be two in order to relate yet in the systemic nature of relating the line between the two is arbitrary. Experienced over a long period of time with a therapist whose premises about relating are congruent with the actual systemic nature of relating, it gradually “sinks in” for the client. Premises about relationship (L II) as they are worked out, made explicit, and no longer needed, gradually give way to the meta-experience of relating in general (L III). The meta-experience of relating, that relating transcends “I” and “you”, allows for the immediate experience of relating in which “I” is irrelevant. Abstract premises become congruent with most immediate experience.

The word “congruent” may still need further explanation. We use it to mean “of compatible form.” Congruence of premises means one’s premises about interaction of a given level of abstraction are compatible with one’s premises at a higher or lower level or with one’s premises of the same level evoked by a very different context. A schizophrenic person’s paradoxical L II premises are not reflexively congruent, i.e. not compatible with any coherent way of organizing experience. John Jones operated on L II premises that he was not to blame and that someone in his family was to blame, most likely himself. In sudden religious conversion often a person experiences a sudden change at Level III which is not congruent with his habits of punctuating interactions, L II. For a while the world is made anew. The person is no longer his old self struggling to get ahead. He is a “child of “Christ” (or whatever). Yet if this position of standing within the greater world system, experienced by the convert as his being surrounded by the love of God and as a kinship with all other people, is not supported by a change in form of interactions in which the convert participates, i.e., by L II change, he will gradually revert to his old L III premises. The people who originated the practice of cloistering converts were no fools.

Therapy promotes congruence between various levels of abstraction of premises learned. As premises become more congruent, greater complexity of experience is possible. With neurotic people, complexity of experience is curtailed in order to maintain a restricted congruence, a congruence between restricted premises and experience. Psychotic people often find themselves awash in complexity because they have lost any congruence of experiencing as the paradox inherent in their L II premises gradually ramifies throughout their experiencing. All experience is potentially significant because they have lost the ability to discriminate what is relevant from what is irrelevant for them.

“Congruence” and “complexity” are our distillations of the two most fundamental, or, if you will, most abstract concepts in Bateson’s approach. Bateson himself attaches no special significant to either of these specific words and might object to any distillation to fundamental principles. It should be noted that these are fundamental for understanding. They are not fundamental principles such as the pleasure principle or death principle which propel, as it were, the events of one’s life. Concepts of this level of abstraction are self-validating organizing epistemological principles which are useful within a whole language system such as we have developed here. Standing on their own, they are useless clichés. Within the language system they can lend more understandable form to the language itself as well as to the phenomena discussed in the language.

As we turn away to assess our progress to this point we discover that at least in its first exposition, our language is complete. It has not developed into a small set of terms nearly as much as it has been an expression of an epistemology. The numbered levels of learning or pattern formation have been practically our only shorthand. In the present chapter we have taken it about as far as it will go for understanding an individual in the process of developing it.

In the next chapter we will talk about several forms of therapy using the understandings we have developed so far. There will naturally be some refining possible as specific systems are considered. If what we have been attempting is a truly useful enterprise, many of these systems should open before us for examination and comparison in newly illuminating ways.

THE LANGUAGE AND OTHER THERAPIES

Looking back from the vantage point of 1999, the therapies discussed in this chapter are little more than footnotes in the development of the field. In 1974, when they were chosen, they all met the criteria for inclusion. These were: 1. they had to be established enough to have written texts describing their practice and therapists who were learning to practice in that way in some sort of training program, 2. they had to be new enough so that there was one primary person or group describing the practice, not competing factions. Even with this explanation, I find some of the language embarrassing today. Thankfully, many of the terms, such as “bad breasts”, have faded into the obscurity they so richly deserve.

We have talked about the language a great deal in the process of constructing it. In this chapter we will attempt to put it the language to work. We want to use the understandings we have developed so far to assess different systems of psychotherapy. By “assess” is meant an attempt to make clear what a psychotherapy is attempting, how it goes about accomplishing its ends, and what about the process is therapeutic.

We will try not to lose sight of the fact that “a psychotherapy” is a very misleading concept. The term is simply a descriptive distillation of the process between two (or more) people. It may help to keep this in our minds if we use the name of the person who developed the system of psychotherapy. Instead of saying what “Direct Analysis” would do, we will say what John Rosen would do. It should be understood, however, that we are discussing the formal aspects of the interactive process described by John Rosen. We do not want to speak in a say that causes the person of the therapist to be lost, but we must speak in terms general enough so that the therapist need not be a specific person.

Further along in this chapter, after we have discussed three therapies using the language as it has been developed so far, we will attempt to extend it just a bit further. Using the identification of premises about interaction with patterns of interaction which we made much earlier, we will attempt to apply our numbered hierarchy of levels of learning not only to the psychotherapy of an individual, but also to the therapy of a family system. Since every attribute of the interaction between levels of learning has at one time or another been identified as a basic systems phenomenon, we have been talking about the individual as a system all along. Our hierarchy should be equally applicable to another system, such as a family.

Using our discussion of Freud’s therapy as a model, we will discuss the following therapeutic systems: Gestalt Therapy of Frederick Perls, “relationship therapy” of Jessie Taft, Direct Analysis of John Rosen and Network Therapy of Ross Speck and Carolyn Attneave. None of these discussions will approach being exhaustive. There will be aspects of any given therapy which cannot be discussed clearly because they are undecidable in the literature. There may be a great discrepancy between what is written about a therapy and the way the process takes place in practice. We will only work with what is written. There will not be an attempt as there was with Freud to discuss the theory behind the therapy extensively in our terms. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the potential of our language for assessing very different therapies built on very different theoretical foundations in the same consistent set of terms and understandings. If the potential of our language can be clearly demonstrated, the work of this thesis will be largely completed.

GESTALT THERAPY

Gestalt Therapy, as explained by its originator, Frederick Perls, is centered on the words “now” and “how”.

I maintained that all therapy that has to be done can only be done in the now. Anything else is interfering. And the technique that lets us understand and stay with the now is the “awareness continuum,” discovering and becoming fully aware of each actual experience. If you can stay with this, you will soon come across some experience which is unpleasant. For instance, you get bored, or feel uncomfortable, or feel like crying. (189) (his emphasis)

In therapy or in any other setting a person has difficulty staying in the “now”. As these difficulties arise the word “how” becomes relevant. A person is asked to focus on how he deeps himself from being in the now. Each time a person leaves the now, the question of how he is doing this puts him back into the awareness continuum. The structure of the approach is “unbeatable” in the sense that all one’s efforts to define a different relationship by not following the prescribed procedure are simply more processes for one to be aware of, in which one can experience how one is leaving the “now.”

Perls says we run away from the now in various ways, all of which are in service of maintaining the status quo.

The status quo is holding on to the concept that we are children. . . . We are infantile because we are afraid to take responsibility for the now. To take our place in history, to be mature, means giving up the concept that we have parents, that we have to be submissive or defiant, or the other variations on the child’s role that we play . . . . Maturation is the development from environmental support to self-support. The baby is entirely dependent on environmental support. As the child grows up, it learns more and more to stand on its own feet, create its own world, earn its own money, become emotionally independent. (190) (his emphasis)

The neurotic, according to Perls, is clinging to the position of the child. In his investment in the past or anxiety about the future he maintains himself in an immature, emotionally dependent position. The neurotic is a person, as we said in discussing Freud, whose L II premises are inappropriate in his present context which calls for “mature” functioning.

Perls approaches L II premises through their manifestation in the structuring of immediate perception by requiring the client to continue in “now awareness”. We have talked at great length about the way one’s L II premises structure one’s perception of one’s world. When Perls requires a person to stay attentive to immediate perception, he forces them to a reworking of their patterns of perceiving. By doing this the person’s usual L II premises are rendered inoperable.

. . . most psychotherapies are trying to get to the deepest depth. We are trying to get to the outermost surface. As every need, every unfinished situation emerges, we are being controlled by this emergent need and have to get in touch with the world to satisfy this need. We use our senses to observe, to see what is going on. The world is opening up. This ability to see is health. Conversely, the neurotic can be defined as a person who can’t see the obvious, as in Anderson’s fairy tale where only the child points to the obvious--that the king is naked. (191)

As L II premises are rendered inoperable one begins to struggle to reestablish one’s punctuation of relationship. In his approach to this phenomenon, Perls is very similar to Freud. All behavior is acceptable because all behavior is defined as relating to the patient himself. He is not confusing, blocking or otherwise sidetracking the therapist, according to Perls. He is doing these processes to himself. Perls is simply there to help him experience how he does this to himself. Freud defines all behavior as transference, as not really aimed at the therapist, but at some person from the patient’s early life. Perls defines this behavior as aimed at the patient himself.

For Freud, the definition of behavior as “transferred” from its proper object allowed him to accept these gambits as part of the necessary therapeutic process. Perls places patients in a similar paradox. Every gambit can be part of the therapy because the patient is doing it to himself. This is brought home as the patient is asked to play all the roles in a given relationship in which he is attempting to play only one. A patient who is determined to be smarter than the therapist might be asked to be both the more intelligent patient and the therapist. This playing of roles in a relationship gives a quick and powerful experience of the total form of a particular L II premise. This is especially powerfully carried out in working with dreams, which Perls does a great deal. As was referred to in Chapter II, Bateson sees dreams as iconic representations of patterns of relationship between the dreamer and other people or between the dreamer and his environment. They are often L II patterns representationally and metaphorically experienced. Perls uses dreams as a way of facilitating experience of a total L II pattern by having a person enact the different elements of the dream. In this way the message that one does what one does in therapy to oneself is reinforced in that all aspects of the dream are seen as a representation of oneself rather than as pointing to referents other than the dreamer. The whole of the L II pattern is evoked in the dreamer’s experience.

The role of the therapist in Perls’ view is one of great freedom in relating to the client. this freedom in relating to the client. This freedom is guaranteed by Perls’ use of paradox. He defines his role not as trying to change people but as a person helping people to better experience what they already are. And who best knows who the patient is or wants to be? Perls again avoids the trap. The patient knows best.

The more you refrain from interfering and telling the patient what he is like or what he feels like, the more chance you give him to discover himself and not be misled by your concepts and projections. (192)

When the patient attempts to involve the therapist as a causer of change or as a fixer of his troubled life, Perls says the therapist must firmly demur.

And you must be very careful to teach your patients to differentiate between reality and their fantasies, especially the transference fantasy--where they see you as a father or someone who can give them the goodies. Make them lock again and again to see the difference between this father and you until they wake up and come to their senses. (193)

With his role protected by the paradoxical definition of therapist, Perls is free to be spontaneous in dealing with a patient. He is able to “trust the wisdom of the organism”: himself.

So, if you feel compelled to listen to all the garbage your patients say, especially if they are trying to bore you, hypnotize you, put you to sleep, you will be exhausted by the end of the session or of the day. But if you allow yourself withdraw when there is no interest, you will find yourself immediately involved again when something of interest occurs. (194)

The therapist stays in the now, in his own awareness continuum. He is able to be spontaneous because he is not bound to the patient by obligations in the structured definition of the relationship. In this way Perls is able to be a model of non-neurotic functioning, as he defines it, in the therapy situation, just as Freud was able in the analytic situation to model non-neurotic functioning as he defined it, where Freud kept personal integrity, Perls is spontaneous.

Perls sees neurosis as a five-layered process. First is the phony layer, the role player layer. This is the way people typically first present themselves in therapy. When the phoniness of their approaches becomes clear, the phobic layer takes over. This is the state of rejection of what we are, the investment in “should not’s”. After this layer is the impasse, the feeling of deadness, of inability to move. Next comes the implosive layer, full of energy but energy in tension, inward directed and fostering no movement or creativity. Finally is the explosive layer. Here one explodes into grief, joy, orgasm, or anger.

When Perls sees as the layers of a neurosis are certainly the stages of a typical therapy as he has observed them. In the first two stages we see a person working with this old L II premises. First he attempts to behave the way he is used to. Secondly he experiences the other role in most of these relationship premises, the “you should not do such and such” role formerly taken by his parents. Thirdly comes the impasse. He cant go on with these inappropriate patterns, but he has no others to organize his relating. He feels dead. As the relationship continues without his being able to organize it, he feels greater and greater tension. Finally the tension is released in an explosion of spontaneous expression. There have been lots of cues all the way along in the “now” orientation of the therapy that spontaneity is the solution to the bind the patient has been in.

The L II pattern embodied in the whole therapeutic interaction is one in which person is struggling to be in control, yet completely tangled up (even talking to himself) while another person is in complete control and is able to be quite spontaneous. As a person gradually takes on the L II premises embodied in the whole interaction to help him make sense of experience when his original L II premises are no longer viable, he gains an alternative to his position as a tangled up person struggling to define the relationship. Everything in the structure of the interaction pushes him to learn this pattern quickly and then to risk trying the spontaneous role.

In our discussion of Freud we listed five ways in which analysis caused change in a person’s punctuation of experience. It is surprising how these same five categories are applicable to Gestalt Therapy with only a change of technique in the way they are approached. From our discussion so far we can say that Gestalt Therapy promotes change in the following ways:

1. L II premises usually manifested in the patient’s thinking (internal dialogue) and communication are rendered inoperable by the requirement that he remain in the “now”.

2. L II patterns of interaction which the patient is used to fostering in his relating are precluded by the redefining of these attempts to foster particular ways of relating as things the patient does to himself. All behavior of the patient to redefine the situation is defined as part of the treatment.

3. L II premises are invoked in the patient’s enacting of his dreams and as a result of trying to remain in the “now”. They are manifested in “how” the patient exhibits his inability to remain in the present. These are the patterns structuring his perception which prohibit more immediate sensory awareness.

4. In the enacting of all the roles in a given relationship or dream, the patient is able to experience the whole form of the particular L II pattern/premise.

5. In the building of tension toward an explosion of spontaneity, there is the experience of a paradigm of the L II pattern embodied in the whole interaction, L II patterns which the patient is likely to adopt as a way of giving an organization to perception of relating which was lost when his former patterns were experienced as no longer viable.

We have talked exclusively about L II in relation to Gestalt Therapy because it is difficult to ascertain how much L III issues are a part of the therapy. There are some indications that they are not usually a part of Perls’ therapy. He is leery of working with psychotic people, i.e., people who lost the ability to form L II premises. While he approaches the role quite paradoxically, Perls as therapist often seems to be the controller of the therapeutic interaction. This makes him seem not to be “standing within” a larger process in the room. Phrases he uses to describe a mature person such as “emotionally independent” sound like the phrases of a person who understands the ultimate form of relating in ways very similar to those described in Chapter IV as usually embodied in our culture.

Yet the practice may have been very different. Perls in many places in his talking about relating uses language which is quite different from the usual L III premises of the culture. The orientation to present awareness is an orientation away from “self” awareness and toward systemic awareness. The trust in the wisdom of himself as total organism rather than in just his conscious understanding is one expression of a willing participation in a larger system. There is certainly L III wisdom embodied in the tenets on which Gestalt Therapy is based and a potential for learning L III in the therapy itself. If ultimately Perls was true to his word, that he was not the change agent in the room, if over a long enough period a patient was able to experience Perls’ trust in the wisdom of the organism that was the therapeutic interaction as well as his ability to be spontaneous in the interaction, then Gestalt Therapy would have been, for the patient, not only an experience of other more satisfying ways of punctuating relationships, but a less paradoxical experience of the most fundamental nature of relating.

Perls developed a therapy which uses easily describable techniques. Because these techniques are dramatic and easy to describe, the therapy lends itself easily for analysis of the way in which it fosters Learning II. The way in which Gestalt Therapy fosters Learning III is much more difficult to describe because it depends so much upon the specific therapist and the degree to which he is able to stand within the greater process of therapy which is implicit in many of Gestalt Therapy’s theoretical tenets. It is just this characteristic of this therapy, the ease with which one can discern techniques which the therapist uses in fostering Learning II and the subtlety of the Learning III approaches in the therapy which might make it a therapy which people who had little sense of Learning III concerns would practice. As with psychoanalysis, one would be an effective Gestalt therapist without reflecting the Level III wisdom which is often stated in the theory on which the therapy is founded.

RELATIONSHIP THERAPY

In the introduction to her book, The Dynamics of Therapy in a Controlled Relationship, Jessie Taft talks about the changes in her conception of therapy over twenty-five years of practice.

It has developed from the notion of reform of the “other” through superior knowledge of life and psychology, a concept closely allied to that of scientific controls in the field of emotion and behavior, to my present acceptance of therapy as presented in this volume, a therapy which is purely individual, non-moral, non-scientific, non-intellectual, which can take place only when divorced from all hint of control, unless it be the therapist’s control of himself in the therapeutic situation. (212)

This sounds like the testimony of a person who has gone from a Learning II approach to therapy to one that is more centered around Learning III concerns. Yet it is the “testimonial” ring in the words which is likely to make one forty years later a bit skeptical. We will take what we says seriously, but proceed cautiously.

We said in the last chapter that a L III approach to therapy would probably be manifested in the therapists “standing within” a larger process in the room rather than maintaining himself as the treator of the patient. We said that firm belief in a curative force within the client is probably a transform of the above premise. We also said that there will probably be some disjunction of premises between the cultural/institutional context of the therapy . . . and those developed in the relating system in the therapy room. This disjunction offers options at the most abstract level in one’s functioning in a cultural context, or, put another way, one’s context is redefined to involve the most fundamental elements of human existence rather than the more paradoxical premises discussed in the last chapter which are encountered in the culture.

Taft’s approach fits the above description remarkably closely. She starts her book with a discussion of the therapist’s limitations. The therapist has no power to cure the client and can only wait for the client to make use of his (the therapist’s) skills. She dismisses out of hand all duress in bringing a patient to therapy as contradiction in terms. Therapy under coercion is impossible.

My knowledge and my skill avail nothing, unless they are accepted and used by the other. Over that acceptance and possible use, I have no control beyond the genuineness of my understanding of the difficulty with which anyone takes or seeks help, my respect for the patient, however negatively expressed, and the reality of my acceptance of my function as helper not ruler. If my conviction is real, born of emotional experience too deep to be shaken, then at least I am not an obstacle to the person who needs help but fears domination. He can approach me without the added fear and resistance which active designs for his cure would surely produce and can find within the limitation which I accept thus sincerely, a safety which permits him to utilize and me to exercise all the professional skill and wisdom at my command. On the other hand, the person who seeks the domination of another in order to project his conflict and avoid himself and his own development by resisting the efforts of the other to save him, is finally brought to a realization of the futility of his striving, as he cannot force upon me a goal which I have long since recognized to be outside my province and power. (213)

Taft is quick to point out that accepting one’s limitations in therapy is not a call for passivity. Far from it.

As I conceive it, the therapeutic function involves the most intense activity but it is an activity of attention, of identification and understanding, of adaptation to the individual’s need and pattern, combined with an unflagging preservation of one’s own limitation and difference. (214)

Taft sees two closely connected themes, or perhaps meta-themes, as being central to all therapy: the issue of time and the issue of union vs. separation. Both themes to her are experienced in the relating of any one hour as well as in the whole course of therapy. Each hour is a limited amount of time to be used which mirrors the most profound fact of human limitation and mortality. The gradual development of the patient’s ability to accept this limitation in its immediate and more far reaching significance is one of the main characteristics of a “successful” therapy.

Time in itself is a purely arbitrary category of man’s invention; but since it is a projection of his innermost being, it represents so truly his inherent psychological conflict, that to be able to accept it, to learn to admit its likeness to one’s very self, its perfect adaptation to one’s deepest and most contradictory impulses, is already to be healed, as far as healing is possible or applicable, since in accepting time, one accepts the self and life with their inevitable defects and limitations. This does not mean a passive resignation but a willingness to live, work and create as mortals within the confines of the finite. (215)

The limitations of the therapist in Taft’s approach to therapy are isomorphic with the limitations with which the patient must wrestle. She is constantly struggling to be fully alive and active in the therapy situation while understanding that she has no power to force a change, beneficial or otherwise in the client. This is an exact mirroring of the issues she sees the client (and any human being) wrestling within terms of the time limitations of each hour and of therapy as a whole. Within these limitations, this microcosm of the general human condition, the nature of relating can be explored and experienced intensely.

Relationship therapy is an opportunity for the patient to experience, step by step, his own habitual ways of relating. It is also a process in which the most fundamental nature of relating, inherent in whatever style the patient brings to the experience, can be highlighted and tried out.

Taft sees two basic aspects involved in relating. One is the experience of union, first exemplified in intrauterine experience and later possible in the dissolution of the usual ego bounds possible in human relating. The other is the experience of separation, of individuality, of independence; the experience of oneself as “an autonomous creative will.” In the recognition of both these impulses and the understanding of the ambivalence in which a person experiencing both is caught there is a possibility for a therapist to aid a patient in more clearly experiencing both. When a patient begins to feel warm toward Taft she may accept this emotion with a verbalized understanding that the opposite emotion is likely just as real and just as present. This, she feels, allows the person to stay with one emotion without having to invoke separation reactions in response to a therapist’s overly warm response. Thus the patient is able to continue toward union, to extend and deepen the experience of both aspects of relating.

The reason why these experiences in relationship which I have called therapeutic, are healing for the individual, is that there is present always in every human being underneath the fear, a powerful, more or less denied, unsatisfied impulse to abandon the ego defenses and let the too solid organization of the self break up and melt away in a sense of organic union with a personality strong enough to bear it and willing to play the part of supporting whole . . . . That such an intense emotional realization of one human impulse should equally intense fear goes without saying. It is the final overcoming of fear, fear of loss of the self, and fear of the loss of the other, to the point of taking the experience regardless of the consequences, that constitutes the first victory for therapy. (216)

The therapist need have no worry that the intensity of the union of the therapeutic situation will lead to the patient’s permanent dependence on the therapist.

The patient does not need to be warded off, except as he demands response in kind or carries his impulses to unacceptable union. He will not cling forever unless he meets counter-resistance in the therapist. His own will to selfhood which has been held in abeyance during this phase of domination by the love forces, will now of its own accord begin to restore the balance and initiate the movement which leads to separation. The therapist has only to recognize it, to admit its rightness and reality which the patient is too confused by guilt to confess it openly. (217)

When we read Taft’s description of union in a greater system and the subsequent promotion of the separation of each person in the system as the essence of therapy, we are reminded of our own words in Chapter II describing the basic form immediate perception. “Because there is a perceived outline, there is difference. Because there is perceived difference, there is relationship. Because there is relationship, there can be perceived meaning.” It would seem that the union/separation model of therapy is isomorphic with the most basic form of human perceiving.

Separation will be difficult, but it is a part of the therapeutic process every bit as important as the building toward union in the feelings of the client. It need not be pushed. It will come organically as the patient gradually returns, or perhaps, finally comes to an individuated “ego”. The overcoming of the fear aroused in union allows new risks in independence. The therapist eases the process by accepting it, by recognizing the strivings for separation in the patient and thereby lessening the guilt which these strivings arouse.

This long course of therapy is mirrored in every hour. Movements toward union and separation are constantly being made by the client.

In every hour there will be minor yieldings and minor withdrawals. Underneath these shorter surface movements the patient as well as the therapist feels a deeper current which flows with a different time span but with the same interplay of conflicting tendencies. The week has its own ebb end flow, just like, just like the hour and yet there is a general trend in terms of a still longer span which carries the love impulse to its climax of acceptance and brings the ego strivings to the final point of rejection of the supporting relationship and assertion of the independent self. (218)

In our paraphrasing of Taft we have necessarily taken on some of her testimonial tone. It seems inevitable when one is so clearly speaking of L III concerns. We have, nevertheless, tried to carefully report her approach to therapy and we will now try carefully to say in our language what she seems to be doing.

One of the most striking features about her approach to therapy is that even with extensive case material supplied, it is hard to say exactly what she is doing. There are minor instances of technique such as the supplying the negative side of a patient’s ambivalent feelings toward her so that the patient can continue longer in the positive side. There are also numerous instances of her explicitly stating her limits. “I will be here for you at 10 on Thursday.” “No, I cannot see you Tuesday.” “No, only from 10 to about 11.” (She is working with children.) These hardly give one a coherent picture of a technique.

All we can make of Taft’s therapy initially is how it is directed at Learning III. She certainly stands within a larger process in the room and sees the potential for healing as in the patient and in the process between them. In the absolute shunning of pressure on the patient to be in or continue in therapy, she sets up a disjunction from the way relating is presented culturally in families and institutions. The patient is not required to be in the relationship, and there are no criteria for success as a member of the relating duo. In her talk of the patient’s experiencing a dissolution of ego bounds as part of the coming to a more integrated individuality she describes the L III premises which we said were not paradoxical and were a chan