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From: Giles Bixler
Date: 10/18/98
[Editor's Note: This message was originally posted 10 May 1998 but was missing in action and is now back.]
This is an exerpt, a preamble of sorts, from my MA thesis in counselling psychology. It is an attempt to explain the background assumptions, the context, if you will, that I brought into the experience of organizing and writing about my work on attachment issues and trauma with a group of attention deficit adults, which formed the basis of my thesis. I wrote this several months before my first experience (in April ‘98) with Bob Stolorow and intersubjectivity theory, and looking back on what I wrote before listening to Bob Stolorow it seems no accident that I was so stimulated and at the same time relieved to find someone who had been wrestling with these subjectivity questions so extensively and eloquently.
I have chosen this path of exploration for my thesis because it reflects my behavior and experience as a helping professional. The thinking process I enter in this way will be of most use to me. I am a clinician, not an experimental scientist. The paper is personal and anecdotal and I do not attempt to dress it up in pseudo-scientific language. However, I believe much can be gained by bringing a scientific attitude into what are essentially uncontrolled interpersonal situations, whether professional or not. [To some extent this paper is a commentary on the nature of scientific inquiry.] I would call myself a naturalist engaged in the study of human behavior. I have travelled from the attempted objectivity of daily journalism, which I practiced for 10 years, to drawing the human figure, to teaching young children, to counselling families and then adults, and lately to psychotherapy where objectivity is a daily exercise in empathic immersion [Oh dear, I seem to remember Bob's calling this phrase of Kohut's "the concept of immaculate perception." Ouch. I really liked his alternative version of empathy as an analog search.] in another human's struggles. Liberally mixed into the immersion bath is an ongoing attempt at neutrality about my reactions and those of my client. This kind of front-line objectivity, if it comes at all, is fleeting and grasped in the midst of everyday chaos, but it has the authentic smell of human experience. Insights gleaned in this way are pragmatic and end up being of use to non-academics, practical and comprehensible to the layman (depending on the skill of the verbalization.) But I also think that such insights (i.e., personal and intuitive) are the seeds for scientific inquiry. As a television news reporter, I once visited the great discoverer of the human stress response [General Adaptation Response], Dr. Hans Selye, in his lab at the University of Montreal. [His library had burned and his office called my assignment editor to get some publicity for fund-raising purposes.] Two images from that experience stand out: One is the laboratory's trays and trays of white lab rats in various states of evisceration, animals who had suffered the ultimate in distress in the service of science. The other is Dr. Selye enjoying his personal daily stress reduction technique, which was to sit back for half-an-hour in his easy chair, feet up, puffing on a big cigar. Dr. Selye said that it was relaxation like this, giving rise to an ability to see his daily experience in a new light, that led to his discoveries. [My analyst used to do this, minus the cigar!]So he continued to structure his stress breaks into his day, whether they led to immediate innovative thinking or not. He regarded unstructured time as refreshment for his mind. The lab mice were for confirmation and elaboration of his intuitive observations and speculations. So it would seem that laboratory scientists indulge in non-linear thinking too. Selye put his view of the question this way in his classic work on the General Adaptation Syndrome :
It seems to me that most people do not fully realize to what extent the spirit of scientific research and the lessons learned from it depend upon the personal viewpoints of the discoverers at the time basic observations are made. The painter and the message on his canvas, the musician or poet and the emotional impact of their creations are but different aspects of a single natural phenomena. It is surprising to what extent the inseparability of this relationship between work and worker has been overlooked as regards the seemingly more impersonal results of scientific investigation. In an age so largely dependent upon science and scientists, I am convinced that this fundamental point deserves special attention. (p. 5, The Stress of Life, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956).
Something like this kind of self-confirmation is what clinicians are often accused of in my field, particulary psychoanalysts, whose ideas have been so dominant in the history of our science. I won't repeat at length the cliché that even practitioners of that purest of sciences, physics, have now realized that observer-impact contaminates the behavior of subatomic particles. The realization that science is an all-too-human exercise doesn't really change the difficulty I or any other clinician have in confirming our hunches except perhaps to legitimize our pursuit of them by including others in our objectivity dilemma.
While we are waiting for the findings of neurophysiology to become more directly useful to us, and we've been waiting for more than a hundred years now, we clinicians need to continue developing a model of mental functioning that is based on our experience, not that of neurophysiologists or that of experimental psychology. I don't mean we should ignore the findings of these two fields of expertise, but as William James said after assessing the usefulness of neurophysiology to psychology more than a hundred years ago "Let us.... relegate the subject of the intimate workings of the brain to the physiology of the future (Principles, 1890, Vol. I, p. 81)," we should let ourselves be informed by them, let their knowledge be integrated into our clinical understandings. But for now we need to develop a working model that accounts for what we know from our experience, the whole experience of the whole person who comes into our office. That model needs to have different rules of evidence, so to speak, it needs to be revisable, flexible and open enough to make room for new phenomena, the kind of everyday experience we have in our consulting rooms (not laboratories, exactly, but nevertheless what David Calof, Ph.D., called a "crucible" in a talk he gave at a B.C. Justice Institute conference on False Memory Syndrome in Vancouver in September 1996). Let's face it, each of us each day says "Mmmm. I've never seen that before." and holds it under advisement, while we go on working with our client, totally committed to their uniqueness while balancing our experience and assumptions in the background. This holistic attitude is really quite contrary to what experimenters do in their process of isolating phenomena, controlling variables and analyzing data. It doesn't mean that we can't organize our data into a useful model. I think such a model could then be subjected to criticism based on what is known by neurophysiologists and experimental psychologists with useful revisions (Unfortunately, a great deal of their research is being funded by pharmaceutical companies, and from my readings of the Internet and my National Institue of Mental Health bulletins, seems oriented to the new biochemical psychiatry with little time for psychotherapy and its effectiveness.). We need a model that accounts for as much of our clinical experience as possible, not the reductionist models that scientists use to test their notions. (Maybe in their woollier creative moments, leaning back smoking a cigar, they would be more interesting to us clinicians, thinking more holistically.)
While we are seeking confirmation of our theories, models, prejudices if you will, those of us who are clinicians, and philosophers and scientists, too, might well take heed of this statement by the existential psychotherapist Rollo May:
The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it - mathematics is the abstraction par excellence, which is indeed its glory and the reason for its great usefulness. Modern Western man thus finds himself in the strange situation, after reducing something to an abstraction, of having then to persuade himself it is real. This has much to do with the sense of isolation and loneliness which is endemic in the modern Western world; for the only experience we let ourselves believe in as real is that which precisely is not. Thus we deny the reality of our own experience...Is not the scientific attitude, rather, to try to see clearly what it is we are talking about and then to find whatever terms or symbols can best, with least distortion, describe this reality? It should not so greatly surprise us to find that "being" belongs to that class of realities, like "love" and "consciousness" (for two other examples), which we cannot segmentize or abstract without losing precisely what we set out to study. This does not, however, relieve us of the task of trying to understand and describe them. (P. 94-95; May, Rollo, The Discovery of Being; Norton, New York, 1983)
I choose May's statement as my guide: to try and understand and describe, then perhaps generalize, but always realizing that the existential fact of my encounter in the therapy room is primary and, at bottom, in some way unanalyzable.
I might add here that in light of my experience with Dr. Stolorow, I find Rollo May's statement poetically or even philosophically true, it's a bit blank psychologically, in the sense that it's more of an exhortation than a guide.
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