Writing

A difficulty with writing is that my interlocutor must be imaginary. My apologies if you are reading this, and feel quite real.

There is a problem with talking to ourselves. Well, there are a pile of problems, really, not least being the 'private language' argument...

One somewhat phenomenological aspect of this occurred to me this morning. When I ‘talk to myself’ it is generally in fragmentary phrases. The more anxious I feel, the more these resolve into definite sentences and short paragraphs, as though I am preparing a more thorough defence.

And yet, even while I do this, I am losing touch with the inner part of myself and paying attention to how I will seem to others. I am leaving my principal source of authenticity and insight behind and paying attention to coping strategies, to verbal ping pong, to ritual combat …

Our model of cognitive capacity as comprising a ‘rational’ functional element – an ‘executive process’ – is quite dangerous here. I think Jerry Fodor has most clearly fallen for the ‘internal monologue’ picture of rationality. It is a picture which is catastrophically self-referential: ‘I know that what I think makes sense because it looks like what I would say if I was making a good case. And I know this because that is how I report my thoughts to others’ … which is no more than to say that I know how to talk. How to be intelligible. Accounting for this in terms of some kind of ‘internal intelligibility engine’ is almost ridiculously circular.

The public-facing imagination is where we are most likely to find what Carl Rogers and others have called ‘introjected values’ – the cut-and-paste patchwork of psychological grafts and donated thought processes that pinch and itch when we try to reconcile them with our lived experience. Values which not only do not come from ourselves, but which we are almost bodily aware of as inconsistent with any possibility of authentic engagement.

The more explicit and articulate my prepared inner monologue is, the more likely it is to be infected – to be a rationalisation built out of introjections.

In the public sphere, how do we distinguish between writing as case-making and writing as authentic exploration? Between self-justification and self-discovery?

Why am I writing this here?

Agency and Relationships

Once we recognise and respect our own agency, we can recognise and respect the agency of others. This is how we make real relationships.

If we try to insulate our own agency - protect it from 'outside influence' - we do not become more free. A free act is not random - it is informed, but not directed. It draws on, but is not determined by, the information resources that human interaction provides - by far the richest information resources we have access to.

Not all these information resources are available to conscious reflection. Perhaps a better way of putting this is to say that we cannot fully articulate them; we cannot put them all into words. This, I think, is part of what Carl Rogers is pointing to by using organism metaphors.

I'm inclined to think that if we specify outcomes in general terms, then what we are doing is not likely to be person-centered. But increased agency and the ability to form productive relationships might figure in there somewhere.

Only if they don't become a mantra or are translated into metrics ...

Forgiveness

If we do not speak to machines, then we cannot accept causal explanations from interlocutors. If someone has become abusive because they have been abused, I can accept this as an explanation but not as a reason. A reason is a justification for a behaviour, not an explanation of how the behaviour arose. We can confuse these – and sometimes it is harmless to confuse them. But sometimes it is not.

For me to forgive someone, I must understand their reasons for their behaviour, and not just its ‘causes’. They must tell me why it felt right to them, at least at the time, to do what they did. If they are unable to do this, I can have no grounds for forgiveness.

I may even feel compassionate towards them, but only in the way one might feel compassion for a dangerous beast that must be controlled to prevent it doing harm. I do not forgive the beast – it cannot ask for forgiveness!

Forgiveness is something that takes place within a conversation, where choices are attributed and reasons are given. If the conversation is impossible, then what can ‘forgiveness’ mean?

I might say to you ‘I forgive my parents’, but what does this mean about my relationship with them? If I ‘say’ it to them, if I mouth the words, what can these 'words' mean if we cannot have a real conversation about what they did – a conversation that includes recognition, reasons, truth.

Perhaps it can be comforting to imagine such a conversation, to have a private talk with oneself. But how can we know what we are doing here? Where would such 'private' talk find its meaning?

Agency

The 'metaphysics' of a mechanical reality don't seem to leave room for 'free will' - the ability to choose.

On the other hand, we must attribute free will to honest and competent interlocutors - people with whom we can have a conversation. This is because we have to regard them as choosing what to say. We cannot have conversations with machines.

This is a puzzle - not least because it is only within real human conversations that we can explore any metaphysical theories, including mechanistic ones!

Apart from contributing to my feeling that we only find ourselves doing metaphysics when we've made some kind of mistake, this puzzle tells us something important about agency in a counselling context.

When I think about the objects of counselling - in so far as these can be formulated without presumption - I think of  the restoration of agency and of the possibility of constructive relationships. And these are not two separate things: it is within our conversations with one another that we attribute and experience agency. Where these conversations go dark, become infected with emotional manipulation, our experience of agency is similarly corrupted.

These is where semantic and emotional conceptions of 'meaning' converge - where the link between being able to talk to one another, and living meaningfully, becomes viscerally apparent.

Introjection

Accommodating introjections is a coping strategy. It may even become a model of coping strategies, so that cognitive/behavioural (rather than phenomenological) approaches, seem to be the ‘right’ way to go about things when we are threatened with incoherence and incongruence.

 

It may even be the case that our investment in these strategies is a what makes introjections so hard to relinquish. When we have had to work hard to achieve a delusional state, it is humiliating, galling, to find that the simple and obvious interpretations we were taught (as children) to reject were actually closer to being correct. We can become convinced that the very essence of adulthood is adherence to damaging shibboleths.

 

 

 

Traumatic Memories

I am a person-centred counsellor, but neither a particular scholar nor a scientist. Any empirical observations I make should be read with that caveat.

Now and again, I have such a sharp impression of something that it seems important to share - sometimes it is based on an experience with a client, and sometimes on personal reflections and friends' stories. This thought is one.

It is a commonplace that children don't like to revisit unpleasant events. My autistic son would never talk about bad things that happened to him in school until they were safely in the distant past. Sometimes it would be months, or years, before we heard about the damaging behaviour of a teacher or an unhappy interaction with a classmate.

Adults, on the other hand, often have clear individual - 'snapshot' - memories associated with traumatic events which they call up when talking about their feelings. Sometimes they say things like "I don't know why this upsets me so much, but it's what I remember - it has stuck in my mind".

What occurred to me was that they may be remembering a moment of insight, and that it is this insight that is itself traumatic. It is the moment they realise that the misery isn't just misery, but part of a malign pattern.

So, to give an invented example:

A child my be persistently emotionally abused by a carer. One day they are at the beach, and the carer refuses the child's request for an ice-cream. At that point the child realises something it has not consciously recognised before: that the carer deliberately makes them unhappy. It may even be the triviality of the disappointment that makes it possible to think about it clearly. However, the realisation is traumatic, and the occasion becomes representative of the feelings associated with relationship - it becomes the 'snapshot' label for a whole container of events which are miserable and undermining, but which the child has no name for nor any 'theory' about.

Someone with an experience like this in their background may come to counselling and say "I don't know why this upsets me so much, it was just an ice-cream." They may still, as adults, be unable to fully visit their feelings about the events that this snapshot represents, and without the feelings the events themselves may escape comment. But the occasion of the snapshot - the occasion that they can visit their feelings about - comes to stand for all the others ...

Scratch Pad, Counselling Thoughts

I occasionally have some very definite thoughts about counselling. And I change my mind about them.

Now that most of my own process is nearing its final stages - I'm somewhat past retirement - I find myself looking more and more at process and less and less at outcomes.

This could be because I have less future for outcomes, but still live constantly with process. Despite what I might have imagined about this stage of my life when I was younger ...

But, returning to counselling thoughts:

I thought I might start by writing down what I presently think counselling might be about. Subject to revision:

More and more, issues of agency and relationships - and, of course, their interaction - occupy my mind. How we practice autonomy within social contexts. How our interactions make us free. How we free ourselves from damaging interactions?

Almost no philosophical writing on free will or coercion is illuminating here. Neither metaphysics, nor psychoanalysis, nor how we use the words 'free' and 'constrained' are much help to us.

We both free ourselves, and discipline ourselves, in our conversations. We can't make sense just on our own, and senseless action is not free in any meaningful way. We make sense to each other, and to ourselves, and act freely within the sense that we make. When the action, the shared sense, and the feeling of sense, begin to conflict with each other then the world goes dark.

This is the core of the 'talking cure': To bring light, love, and autonomy into congruence.

Or at least to find the conviction that this is possible, and to walk along that road...