Alright. Welcome back. So, the next four lectures are also oriented
towards discussion of primarily clinical theories of psychology and psychopathology. We’re going to talk about lines of thinking
that, in some ways, run parallel to those of the psychoanalysts because the thinkers
we’re going to discuss now, with a few small exceptions—well, all of them—all of the
thinkers we’re going to discuss in the next four lectures were either influenced heavily
by Freud, Jung, and Adler or were themselves thinkers who influenced Freud and Jung. So, there’s an intellectual continuity stretching
over—with people who are deeply educated and who very thoughtful there’s intellectually
continuity of ideas stretching over exceptional spans of time. And so that sort of relationship is exactly
what you would imagine. Rogers had a variety of influences—so let’s
say Freud and Jung and Adler—but he was also very much influenced by phenomenological
ideas. And the phenomenologists were, and are—phenomenology
is a brand of philosophy, which I’ll explain more deeply, and the other primary domain
of influence on Rogers was Christianity likely and then Christianity also via probably Northern
European culture as far as I can tell. The reason I’m talking specifically about
Christianity in relationship to Rogers is because as a young man he was a fundamentalist
Christian and he was a seminarian. So he was quite oriented towards mainline
Protestant Christianity, but when he was in university he had a crisis of belief I suppose. He was even going to go to China as a missionary
at one point. But he had a crisis of belief in university
because he had also been scientifically trained. His father was a farmer who used rather advanced
farming techniques, and so Rogers was trained to think scientifically from a very young
age. And he experienced the conflict between his
religious belief and his scientific presuppositions quite intensely, and in that battle his formal
Christian belief was the loser. However, his thinking is very much influenced
by fundamentalist Protestant presuppositions and the effect of those I’ll describe as
we walk through Rogers’ thinking. Now, it’s important to understand the philosophical
underpinnings of a global personality or psychology theory because every theory is set within
a set of assumptions—things that you have to assume to be true in order to proceed with
a theory. They’re like the axioms in classical geometry. You can’t prove the axioms; you have to
accept them. Once you accept the axioms then you can move
forward and use the whole system. I think the reason that systems have to have
axioms, which are elements of belief, is because every system is incomplete, right? It doesn’t cover the entire world. And so, in some sense, you need a place to
dispense with your ignorance and the way you do that is by making assumptions. We’re going to act as if the following is
true. And then you can proceed with a partial theory
and you’ll have some success with it. But it’s useful to understand the presuppositions
because it orients you properly towards the theory. Now Rogers is a phenomenologist, and phenomenology
is a brand of philosophy, which I believe started with Edmund Husserl but was probably
made most influential by his student Martin Heidegger. Now Heidegger was a philosopher I suppose
somewhat like Nietzsche in that his thinking ran very much counter to what you might describe
as general academic philosophy. For example, Heidegger believed that ever
since the time of Plato, which is when people think philosophy began more or less, Western
philosophy had taken an erroneous direction: it had become too concerned with the nature
of structures of thought and not concerned enough about the nature of being. And so you can determine those two things. Being is how things are and thought, of course,
is how you represent things. And one of Heidegger’s missions was to reestablish
being as the central reality of philosophy. Now that begs a question, which is: “What
is being?” Well, to conceptualize reality as being is
not to conceptualize it the same way that you conceptualize it in terms of modern Western
thought, because one of the presuppositions at the basis of modern Western thought is
that the most intelligent way to divide up the world is in terms of subjective and objective
experience or subjective experience and objective world. So the fundamental scientific presupposition,
you might say, is that there is an objective world; it’s the real thing. You come to that by performing certain procedures,
documenting them, describing the outcome of those procedures, documenting them, and then
allowing other people to do the same thing operating under the presupposition that if
they experience the same outcome from the procedures, then what they’re experiencing
is real. That’s basically the scientific method,
right? Method. Results. You detail the method, which is how you act
on the world; you get the results. You compare them, maybe across multiple observations
that you do; and then other people do multiple observations; you come up with a consensus,
but it’s a method bound consensus. And then of course you abstract out general
principles from that and it works very powerfully, right? Make no mistake about it. The idea that there is an objective external
world and that that’s the best way to conceptualize reality is an unbelievably powerful tool. Now, whether or not it’s an accurate description
of reality: that’s a much more difficult question. And it’s partly a matter of definition,
actually. You know, it’s the case there are different
forms of geometry; you might know this. You can start from the presupposition that
reality has a three-dimensional structure—and then you’re basically within the realm of
Euclidean geometry—but you can also start with the presupposition that reality has a
four-dimensional structure. And that kind of geometry was invented in
the late 1800’s and it turned out to be the perfect geometry to describe the universe
that Einstein conceptualized when he came up with his great theories in the second decade,
thereabouts, of the twentieth century. So it’s interesting because can start from
different assumptions, build tools on the basis of those assumptions, and sometimes
you find out that those tools work very well indeed. Now, it’s not that easy to think of flaws
in the subjective experience/ objective world conceptualization, and that’s partly—for
us as modern people it forms the basis of so much of what we think that we just think
about it as axiomatic. It’s just true. It doesn’t bear any question. But I’m going to offer you a couple examples
of why it might bear some questioning and you can think about it. The first problem is is that the classical
scientific view of the world has a very difficult time accounting for certain things. So, for example—these are called “qualia”
often by people who are interested in consciousness—knowing the wavelength of light doesn’t seem to
tell you very much about the subjective experience of color. You know, we experience color, for example,
in a non-continuous fashion, right, because we see discrete colors like you’d see in
a rainbow. I mean they shade into each other to some
degree but it’s not like they go from light red to dark red in a continuum. There are clear demarcations of color. Well, that’s because of the way your brain
is wired. You know, it seems like, over the course of
evolution, what we’ve learned is that parsing up that wavelength fragment in terms of categories,
which would be the different colors that we see, has substantial practical utility. Now one of the things you might ask is, “Well,
do those colors exist?” Well, objectively they don’t seem to exist
as colors, partly because the wavelengths that we see are actually continuous. So when one color shades into another, there’s
no radical transformation in wavelength. It’s a continuum but we see it categorically. Okay, so is that real or not. Are the colors we see real or not? Well, that’s a good question. You can’t get a collective experience of
pain. You can get a collective experience of the
blackboard, but pain seems to be something that’s limited to subjective perception. But it’s very difficult—no one acts as
if pain isn’t real. I mean I would say that of all the things
that you might consider real we act as if pain is the most real thing. You certainly can’t argue out of it for
example. It seems like a fundamental element of experience. Okay, so that’s two places. We also have no account in the subjective/
objective breakup bifurcation of the world—we have no explanation whatsoever for consciousness. And that seems like a big problem, right,
because you can make a case that there is no being without consciousness. Like, “Is there something if there’s no
one there to perceive it?” By the way, that is not the same question
as, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” It’s not the same question. It sounds superficially the same, but this
is a much more complex question because we don’t know, for example, if—we don’t
know the relationship between time and consciousness. We have a certain perception of time. We have a certain temporal realm in which
we exist. Our refresh rate for our vision, for example,
is about sixty hertz, which is why you can see computer screens flicker if they have
a refresh rate slower than that. So sixty hertz to us looks continuous but,
you know, there are a lot of microseconds in a second and for a computer—especially
a fast-processing computer that can do maybe a trillion operations a second—if it was
watching, so to speak, a movie it would just see a still picture that was there forever
and a another still picture that was there forever. And it wouldn’t have the impression of continuous
movement. So there’s this weird subjective element
to time that’s very difficult to understand. And then here’s a more complex criticism
of the subject/ object idea. I thought about this for a long time. So, the best example I know of it is: I read
this book a while back written by a KGB officer and it was published after the fall of the,
you know, wall in the Soviet Empire. And this KGB officer claimed that he had worked
in a biological warfare unit in the Soviet Union, and the purpose of the biological warfare
unit was to turn infectious diseases into aerosols so that they could be sprayed on
enemy populations. And so they were working on two things: developing
a very virulent infections—and a virulent infection is one that’s severe but also
very transmissible, because those things are separate—and also one that could survive
being aerosolized because it turns out that that’s quite difficult, which we should
be all be very thankful about. And one of the products they were working
on was an attempt to cross Ebola with smallpox. Now Ebola is—you all know about Ebola I
presume—it’s very very fatal, although they’ve learned ways to treat it now and
maybe have a vaccine. But at that time it was very very fatal. And smallpox is incredibly contagious, and
so they were hoping they could develop something that was very very contagious and very very
deadly that you could spray on civilian populations. Now, you know, here’s where it gets tricky,
and it gets tricky here because how you answer this question inevitably depends on how you
define truth. And truth is actually something you have to
define before you can have a conversation about it, which is a kind of a strange thing. Anyways, you can make a case that determining
how to cross Ebola with smallpox and aerosolize it is a perfectly valid scientific question,
and because science is value free it’s very difficult to make an argument that that’s
any worse experiment than any other kind of experiment or any other kind of investigation. And you can also imagine even that if didn’t
go to the aerosolization stage that positive things might come out of it. Maybe you’d end up with a more detailed
understanding of DNA or something as a consequence of the investigation that would have positive
consequences. But it still seems that—the idea of doing
scientific research to cross Ebola with smallpox—there seems to be something wrong with that, and
it’s maybe that sense of wrongness as well that can’t be captured within scientific
models. And so one of the things that Jung claimed—and
Rogers and the phenomenologists—is that, in some sense, is that the scientific reality
has to be encapsulated within an ethical reality rather than the other way around. Now Rogers would say, “You know that feeling
that you have when you hear about someone crossing Ebola with smallpox; that feeling
you have in your body. That’s a real thing, that feeling, and that’s
part of being.” Now, for the phenomenologists, being is actually—it’s
complicated to define and it’s hard to understand. But what the phenomenologists do is start
with a different set of assumptions. They don’t assume that the best way to approach
reality is to break it up into the subjective and the objective. They presume instead that the way to approach
reality is by assuming that all your experience is real. All of it. Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t different
categories of experience, you know, because you could still say that a dream and the experience
you have walking—dreaming of walking down the street and walking down the street are
still different things, and the phenomenologists would say, “Yes, you can keep your categorical
distinctions intact, but you have to say that they’re both real.” Now, this is an assumption and I told you
why the assumption is generated. Part of the reason the assumption is generated—the
alternative assumption—is because there are problems that emerge with the set of assumptions
that make up the scientific worldview. Now it’s not that surprising that the scientific
worldview can’t encompass the subjective because the scientific worldview was actually
established—by Bacon and Decartes say and by other thinkers of that time—it was set
up to exclude the subjective from the conceptualization of objective reality. So you can’t really criticize science because
it does that, but you can say the fact that the subjective is excluded is a fault, or
at least an incompleteness, and that incompleteness sometimes has extraordinarily serious consequences
that you can’t just dismiss. Because you might say, “Well, had the Russians—the
Soviets—been successful in crossing Ebola with smallpox and aerosolizing it then we
might all be dead,” and then you might think that any theory that leads everyone to be
dead might reasonably be criticized for its assumption to universal truth. Now, you can debate that and rightly so, but
all I’m pointing out is there are reasons to go at this from another approach. Now, it was Rogers’ basic assumption that
you were more likely to be properly oriented in life if you adopted a phenomenological
approach to your experience and to break up reality in that manner. So let me give you an example. When my daughter was about three, she had
a nightmare and she came running into her parents’ bedroom. And she told me her dream and she was all
upset by it. She might’ve even been younger than three
at that point. And she had dreamed that there was a clear
stream and that it was quite beautiful and that there was garbage littering the bottom
of it. Now by that time, you know, she—kids are
quite sophisticated in their ability to categorize, you know. By that time she’d already learned the difference
between kid things and adult things, and you think, that’s a bloody complex form of discrimination,
you know, because what objective features do adult things share in common that differentiates
them from kid things? You can’t actually come up with a set of
objective criteria that allows that distinction to be made, but kids, by the time they’re
three, have got a pretty clear grasp of that. So they can come up with very sophisticated
classifications. About the same time, one of my friends had
a two-year-old who went outside their house one day, looked down the street, and there
were a couple of garbage cans knocked over. And the kid said, “Uh oh.” And, you know, that’s also extremely sophisticated
because you think, you know, a whole street is a very complex set of visual stimuli and
to be able to glance at that and then to note that something is out of place and then to
make an utterance of it to draw people’s attention to it is a ridiculously sophisticated
cognitive act. And my daughter was doing the same thing within
the context of her dream. So she was upset about this. Now, it’s quite interested, eh, because
you think, “Well, why would someone who was three be upset about the fact that a stream—a
beautiful, clear stream—had garbage in it?” You know, it’s a really—it’s like innate
environmentalism or something like that. Innate concern for the environment and that
could easily be the case, you know. I mean if we fouled our environment up continually
during our evolutionary history that was likely to have very negative consequences. Even birds clean their own nests and so do
bees and, you know, they keep their hives clean and all that. So it could be a very primordial instinct. Anyways, she came in with this dream and she
was quite upset. And then you think there are a couple of things
you could do about that. You could say, “It’s just a dream. Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep,” but, you know, that’s
a philosophical statement, right, and it’s a misleading one, or you could argue that
it was a misleading one, because what does “It’s just a dream mean?” Well, it means that it’s certainly not something
to take seriously like you would take something that occurred during the day seriously. It’s a mere fantasy but with the definition
of fantasy being some fundamentally useless act of play, I suppose, that you can ignore
with no consequences, and not only that that you should ignore it. And, you know, that’s not necessarily true
because then you’re making the case, or you might be making the case, that you don’t
have to pay attention to products of your imagination. That seems like a pretty dopey thing to tell
a child given A, that anything creative that you ever produce is going to come out of your
imagination and B, the way that you set goals and plans for your future is by imagining
them—dreaming about them, right? Everyone knows what it means to pursue a dream. And, you know, you might say, “Well, if
you’re depressed it means all you dreams have disappeared.” It’s like, so maybe you shouldn’t be telling
your child that it’s just a dream and so you can ignore it and go back to sleep, you
know. You don’t know exactly what you’re doing
when you do that. You’re certainly not paying attention to
the child’s experience because she did have that image and it did make her upset, and
those are facts. And as far as people like Rogers would be
concerned, those are facts about reality, or they’re elements of reality, and they
should be dealt with as such. So, I told her to close her eyes and to bring
the dream image up in her imagination, which she could do very well, and then to imagine
that she had some rubber boots on and that she could go into the stream and pick out
the garbage and put it in a garbage bag and that there was a garbage can nearby and that
she could put it in the garbage can. And so we went through that and that calmed
her down and then she went back to bed. And then you might say, “Well, what am I
doing doing that?” Because you might say, “Well, that’s just
a fantasy, just like the dream, and because they’re just fantasies neither of them have
anything to do with reality.” But, you know, that again is not a very sophisticated
way of thinking because the dream presented my daughter with a problem, or you could even
say a class of problems. And the class of problems includes all of
those things that people do, and other animals, of course—all the ways that the environment
can be defiled. Well, that actually is an existential problem. And then you might say, “Well, what should
you do about it?” and the answer to that might be, “Well,
maybe you should do something about it insofar as you can do something about it,” because
then you’re conceptualizing yourself as an active agent and not just a passive victim
or a passive recipient of the problem. You could actually do something about it,
and that’s a way different message than “It’s just a dream; you can ignore it
and go back to sleep.” You know, maybe you shouldn’t actually tell
your child to be ignoring reality and go back to sleep. Maybe you should be telling them to wake up,
and see reality as clearly as they possibly can, and not ignore any of it including their
fantasies and their dreams. And that doesn’t mean that their fantasies
have the same reality as the reality that you experience with everyone else, but that
fact that it’s not the same reality that you experience with everyone else doesn’t
mean it’s not reality. Now Rogers would claim, for example, that
to ignore a private experience warps you fundamentally. So, here are the basic outlines of his view
of the world. So there’s first of all: You exist within
phenomenological field. Now, phenomenon comes from the Greek word
“phainein” and phainein means to shine forth. And so phenomena are those things that shine
forth for you. Now, the way to understand that is to imagine
that you’re reading a book and maybe a passage of it really strikes you as meaningful. Well, then you might say, “Well, why?” There are lots of passages in the book. If someone else was reading the book it’s
not obvious that the same passage would strike them. And then you might say, “Well, is that a
consequence of the structure of you as an interpreter of the book or is it a consequence
of the contents of the book?” and the answer to that is you actually can’t tell, because
the book is neither the thing that’s printed nor the reader. The book is the interaction between the reader
and the book, and that interaction is actually unique for each person even though there are
some commonalities across people—because otherwise you wouldn’t even be able to talk
about a book. Well, regardless, when you’re interacting
with someone some things announce themselves on your field of consciousness and some things
don’t and so the phenomenologists would say, “Well, some things shine forth for
you while other things don’t.” It’s a little bit like one of Jung’s ideas
about the development of the self. Jung believed that if you followed things
that if you followed things that announced themselves to you as meaningful, that they
would take you through a descent to begin with—where you would encounter things you
were afraid of or terrified of and disgusted by and wanted to avoid—and then the consequence
of that would be that you would incorporate a lot of new material into your personality. And the consequence of that would be you’d
be reborn, roughly speaking, as a stronger person, and then if you just kept doing that
all the time for the rest of your life in small or large ways that you’d become more
and more and more fully differentiated and developed. And he would have said that the ultimate potential
target of that kind of development was what he described as the self. The self is a multi-faceted conceptualization,
so that’s not all there is to it, but the self, from the Jungian perspective is who
you could be if you could be who you most deeply are; if you didn’t shy away from
anything; if you accurately encountered and then integrated, even in the Piagetian sense,
your experience. Now that’s exactly the same idea that Rogers
had. He believed that there’s a phenomenal field
and it’s full of experience. All of your experience manifests itself as
the phenomenal field. It’s quite interesting because that means
also that other people are part of your phenomenal field—part of your experience. And then within that field there’s a circumscribed
area that he described as the self. Now that’s different than the Jungian self. So it’s a little terminologically confusing. Rogers’ self is more like Freud’s ego,
but Rogers would define the self as though aspects of the phenomenological field that
you call “I.” “I felt like…” I’ve had clients who tended to talk in the
third person about their emotions, or they would say, “The body.” They wouldn’t say I. Maybe they’re describing
cutting themselves and they would say, “Well, the body needed to be cut.” And what Rogers would say about that was that
the person existed in the phenomenological field and part of that phenomenological field
was demarcated by the self but the self hadn’t expanded to incorporate as much of that phenomenological
field as it should’ve. Another concept that he had was the concept
of the organism. Now, you could think of the self as what you
identify as “I,” and then you can think of the organism as all those things that are
unique to you that you might identify as the “I.” Now it’s tricky, eh, because imagine that
you get angry during a fight with someone—argument—and they say, “You’re angry,” and you say,
“No, I’m not.” It’s like, what exactly are you doing there? The other person—we’re going to assume
the other person’s right for the sake of this argument—they can clearly see that
you’re angry but you’re not allowing the organismic manifestation of that motivational
state or that emotion to be incorporated with those things that you identify with. Rogers would call that incongruence, and he
believed that incongruence was roughly equivalent to psychopathology so that part of your goal
was for the organism to respond appropriately to the broader phenomenological field—now
we can talk about what appropriately means, but we won’t do that yet—and then what
the self was supposed to do was accurately symbolically represent organismic responses
to the broader phenomenological field. So, now you can see that there are similarities
to that concept as say Freud’s idea of the ego and the Id. You know, because the Id was this sort of
external thing, which was home of motivational and emotional forces that couldn’t be easily
integrated into the ego and partly because the superego said, for example, that they
were wrong. So there are these sets of phenomena, you
know, that all of the different clinicians are talking about, but all of them are talking
about it starting from different initial presuppositions. It’s like a group of people in a room shining
a flashlight on a very complex object. You know, they’re all standing in a slightly
different position. The complex object is the same thing but you
can only see parts of it so you need multiple different ways of looking at things so you
can come up with a cohesive and coherent account of something that’s actually beyond your
understanding because, of course, not only can you not accurately symbolically represent
the phenomenological—the entire domain of your being—you can’t accurately represent
even the aspect of that field that’s related to the organismic you. There’s part of you on top that you identify
with “I,” roughly speaking, and it’s trying to model a model of something very
complex and, of course, that’s extraordinarily difficult. Now, why is it doing that? That’s the central mystery of consciousness,
you know. There’s this problem that consciousness
researchers always refer to. It’s annoyingly termed I think. It’s called the “Zombie Problem,” and
the Zombie problem is: Why is consciousness necessary? Why is it necessary for something complex
like a human being to actually have awareness and self-awareness? Why couldn’t it just wander through the
world reacting in pre-determined, deterministic fashion zombie-like. No awareness—robot-like, let’s say. What’s consciousness for? Rogers doesn’t really discuss that and so
we won’t at the moment although I think there are some reasonable ideas. Consciousness, for example, allows you to
generalize between certain phenomena. Anyways, regardless, there are the self, the
organism, and the broader phenomenological field. Let’s say you go into a pub—bar—and
you’ve been there many times and so you know the people in there, you know where to
sit, you know what’s going to happen, you’ve met friends there. You might say that your organism exists, at
least in part, as a very accurate model of that broader phenomenological world. And then, inside that, you’re aware of your
knowledge of the bar, and so if your organism is properly adapted to the broader phenomenological
field, when you go into the bar or other familiar place, things that you expect and want happen
instead of things that neither expect or want. And you could say, “Well, perhaps that’s
a reasonable definition of adaptation.” Now, this isn’t biological or evolutionary
adaptation; this is personal adaptation. They’re similar in some ways but importantly
different. I mean you could be adapted to an environment
without that in any way having any effect whatsoever on your evolutionary adaptiveness. Now, if maybe you’re not very well organismically-adapted
to the environment—you have a model of it—and because of that when you go somewhere familiar,
people don’t like you as much as you think they do and you’re not nearly as much of
a master of that situation as you think you are. And one of the consequences of that—so that
would mean that your self-representation is too rigid and simplistic and full of defenses
to notice the discrepancy between your organism and the broader environment, and that’s
pathological. And the way that that’s going to be marked
is, first, by anxiety. You know, maybe you tell a joke—there are
some people sitting around you—you tell a joke and you see people kind of, you know,
making that face, and maybe rolling their eyes. It’s like, well that’s not exactly—you
might think, “Well, they’re joking. You know, they’re just teasing me.” Well, maybe they’re not; maybe they’re
damn sick of your stupid stories, and you’ve told them fifty times, and you’re not very
funny, and they’d rather you weren’t in the bar at all. And it may be that you’ll actually notice
that, but you don’t necessarily notice it in a fully symbolically-developed way. Now, what that would mean is maybe you start
feeling anxiety, and Rogers identifies different levels of feeling. It might start with the subception, and to
subcede something, which is a word that I guess comes from general semantics, is to
have the event affect the way that you’re interacting with the world in ways that you
don’t necessarily notice. So it’s sort of equivalent to the idea of
subliminal when you talk about advertising. A message is flashed at you and it subtly
changes the way that you interact with the world but you don’t notice that. And that happens to people all the time. I mean it’s actually a part of our normal
cognitive structure. I mean when you walk into this room, the room
tells you all sorts of things about how to behave, and you don’t notice that the room
is telling you those things because you know what it’s telling you so well that you just
act it out. You don’t need to go through all the complex
processes of actually perceiving and thinking about it. And so Rogers’ point is that you can detect
things organismically that will affect the nature of your experience without necessarily
either even perceiving that or definitely not symbolically representing it. Now, maybe the social discomfort that’s
inherent in the situation rises up to the level of perception. That’s not symbolization yet. Then you might think, “Well, what does it
feel like to be anxious?” Well, and I’m not asking, “What are the
objective markers of being anxious?” because we actually don’t know those. We can kind of infer them. Sometimes people’s heart rate goes up, but
sometimes it decelerates, and then there are facial expressions that are associated with
anxiety but you have to use those to infer. If you get anxious, I don’t feel your anxiety;
I have to infer it. But if you get anxious, you feel your anxiety. And so then the question might be, “Well,
what does it mean to feel anxious?” Well, that’s a hard question, and the reason
it’s a hard question is because you never have to answer it because if you tell someone,
“I feel anxious,” then they refer to their own feelings of anxiety and then they know
what you mean. And you never have to come up with an explanation
of what it feels like. The idea that the feeling is an element of
experience is something that we just take for granted, you know. “I got angry today.” Everybody nods. Or maybe I tell a little story and I say,
“Well, you know, I got on a bus and I was missing like two cents, and I asked the bus
driver if he would let me get on the bus and he didn’t. And that really annoyed me because I take
that bus everyday and the driver knows me. And I got angry,” and everybody’ll nod. And the reason they nod is, well partly because
they can imagine that that’s how they would’ve reacted in that situation, but even more importantly,
they accept the reality of angry as a response and they know what it feels like. So, but explaining it: that’s a much more
difficult thing. So the point is is that you can have experiences
that you know of—first of all you can have experiences that you don’t know of. That would be the subceived experiences. Then you can have experiences that you perceive
but that you haven’t symbolically represented, and those might be emotional or motivational
experiences. And then you can have experiences that you
have symbolically represented in a way that captures their gist accurately in a way that’s
reflective or your adaptation, or lack thereof, of the broader phenomenological world. And Rogers would say that latter state is
preferable. You know how to act or you know that you didn’t
act properly and you know how to fix it, which is almost as good, and you represent that
accurately. Now, you might imagine that you could concentrate
on the mismatch between organismic responses and the environment. That’s what behavior therapist really do. They say, “Well, how are you acting and
what are the consequences?” But that isn’t really where Rogers goes. Rogers is more psychoanalytic than the behavior
therapists, and what he seems to be primarily concerned about is whether or not your self-representation
is an accurate representation of how your organism is responding. In some sense, for Rogers, the organism takes
the place of God. It’s more or less omniscient. So your organism is going to tell you the
truth in every situation and it’s up to you whether or not your going to pay attention
to that and make sense of it or whether you’re going to engage in any of the different kinds
of shenanigans that you might engage in to stop yourself from going through the complex
process of symbolization. Because you might say—well, you’re back
in the bar—and you might say, well, you noticed the anxiety and then, you know, different
ways of symbolizing it come to mind. “These people are all just jerks,” and
then another thing that comes to mind is, “Well, maybe nobody likes me.” And then maybe another idea that’s associated
with symbolization comes to mind that is, “Well, maybe there are elements of my social
behavior that I should adjust,” and I presume that if Rogers was having a conversation with
one of his clients he would assume that that was the most fruitful potential step towards
accurate symbolization. Now, Rogers felt that anxiety emerged when
the self-concept was not accurately symbolically representing the organism’s experiences,
and so that would be, in some sense: If you’re a house divided within yourself then you’re
pathological from a Rogerian perspective. And you can think about that, in some sense,
as a move away from necessary simplicity. I mean if your self-concept is set up properly
it doesn’t contain contradictory and misleading bits of information; everything works seamlessly
together. And so what that would mean is that you think
about something, you act it out, and it works. And then that’s an indication that the organization
between, say, these three different levels of being is—well the right word is isomorphic. Each represents the other with sufficient
accuracy. And so that means that you’re congruent,
and if you’re congruent then the world is treating you not only in the manner that you
want to be treated but also in the manner that’s most likely to further your action
in the world as an organism. And so that’s partly why Rogers believed
that the organism had wisdom: it’s because its natural proclivity was to operate in the
world effectively and to expand its competence at the same time. Now, a self-actualized person—because that’s
one of Rogers’ phrases—is someone whose self-concept accurately represents their organismic
being. Now, Rogers was primarily a clinician as well
and his theories were derived from his clinical experience. And his theories informed his clinical practice. And Rogers invented, or developed, what he
believed to be a new kind of therapy and he called that “client-centered therapy.” Now you’ve probably heard about student-centered
education. I mean Rogers’ ideas have had a tremendous
amount of influence, certainly not least in educational psychology—also in conflict
reduction of various sorts. If you start with Rogers’ initial assumptions,
which are, first of all, that you should regard your experience as real; second, that your
organism will give you accurate information about the totality of experience; and third,
that your self-concept should accurately encompass your actual experience, there are implications
of that theory for therapy. And one of the implications is that you can
figure out what you should do if you want to because your organism will tell you, or
at least hint at you, about which directions are correct and which directions aren’t,
and if you follow those then you’re going to naturally gravitate towards a state of
being where you’re more and more accurately represented by yourself but also that your
representation and your organism are going to act more effectively in the world. They’re not bumping up against each other
all the time. And, you know, they’re not in conflict anymore,
and so that’s the goal of the self-actualized person. And therapy, in part, is the art of furthering
that process of self-actualization. Now, Rogers was opposed to diagnosis because
he felt that it didn’t sufficiently represent the vital minutia of the client’s individual
experience, and I think that his claim was extremely important, you know, because medicine—psychiatry—tends
to classify everything. And you might say, “Well, are the psychiatric
diagnostic classifications real?” and then the answer to that is: It depends on what
you mean by real. And you might think, “Well, that’s an
annoying answer,” but it is still the answer. And so I could say if I was being cynical—although
I don’t really think it’s a cynical response—if I willing to sound cynical, that the only
reason that psychiatrists diagnose their clients is so that insurance companies pay the bills. And I actually believe that that’s more
true than the claim that the psychiatric diagnostic categories actually capture the essence of
the person’s problems. In my clinical experience, classification
has had almost zero utility, and the reason for that is because it’s too low resolution. It doesn’t capture the individual properly
because the thing about a client—a clinical client—is that it’s precisely their individuality
that’s the fundamental issue. It’s like, they have to make their way through
the world in their body, in their time, in their position in culture, with their advantages
and disadvantages, and that requires a solution that’s unique in many ways and one that’s
also personal. And Rogers also wasn’t a particularly great
fan of the psychoanalysts’ tendency to look for the causes of present behavior in past
events. So he didn’t regard fishing in the past
as a necessarily useful expedition, or as a necessary expedition, although if issues
of the past came up in therapy he was perfectly willing to deal with them. He didn’t accept the Freudian theory that
the fundamental cause of psychopathology was, say, traumatic past experience. Now, this gives Rogerian therapy a particular
flavor. You could also call it “Non-directive therapy.” Now, if you’re a behavior therapist, you
might actively strategize with your client about what they’re going to do in the next
week and once they establish their goals you might offer some hints about what strategies
they could use to monitor themselves and to attain those goals, and maybe you’ll even
have them keep track of it. Rogers, generally speaking, wouldn’t do
something that directive. In fact, he strove not to unduly influence
the client’s decisions about important future events, and in that way he was quite similar
to Freud, because Freud would sit so the client would be laying on a couch and Freud so that
the client—his patient actually—couldn’t see him. And then he would listen to the person free-associate,
which in some sense means that they would ramble on, and he was attempting by doing
that to facilitate the self-realization of their own memories. If things happened to you in the past and
they still cause you emotion—let’s say they’re more than eighteen months old for
the sake of argument—Freud would assume that if you kind of wandered around that memory
somewhat haphazardly and in an associational way—the way conversations naturally unfold—that
you would bring things to light and that would allow certain kinds of emotional expression,
and that, in fact, in itself would be curative. But Freud didn’t want to interfere with
that process or guide it to any great degree, and Rogers was like that; he wanted you to
make your own decisions. And so he believed that the therapeutic endeavor
could not occur unless certain conditions were met, and the conditions were: Willingness
to tell the truth. So when a client comes to see me, one of the
first things I tell them is: “You can tell me anything you want—although you’re perfectly
within your rights to maintain your privacy—you can tell me anything you want but tell me
the truth as clearly as you can because if you don’t I don’t know what’s going
on with you and there’s not any possibility at all that this process will be useful if
we’re talking about things that don’t exist. So one condition is the person is willing
to come and see you; so that means they want to transform. The second precondition is that they’re
going to communicate with you, and communication means they’re going to do their best to
tell the truth but the therapist takes the same vow, in a sense. And so one of the things that I tell my clients
is that I will never let them do anything that makes me resent them. So if I’m asked to step out of my way for
some reason to take an additional session or maybe to meet them somewhere and I do it,
they can be assured that there won’t be a price that will be extracted from them later
for interfering with the smooth flow of my day. So, and the other thing that I do—and I’ve
learned this from Rogers and from the other people that I’ve read—is that I’ll listen
to people talk and then sometimes something will occur to me. And I don’t think about it as I thought
something because I’m actually somewhat a follower of Nietzsche’s dictum, which
is that the fact that you think is no proof that—the fact that you experience thoughts
is no proof that you thought them. They just appeared. Well, you don’t think that you think up
your dreams, right? You have your dreams. There you are in bed; there are the dreams. Are you having them? Well, it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like you’re experiencing them,
in some sense, the same way that you experience the external word. You’re not voluntarily creating them. Well, why do you think anything different
about your thoughts? And that’s a very useful thing to realize,
by the way, because otherwise you think you’re your thoughts and then if you have negative
thoughts, well then you assume that they’re true and they’re not true just because you
think them. They’re just thoughts, and maybe they’re
true and maybe they’re useful and maybe they’re not. So stepping back from them a little bit is
incredibly—it’s like Buddhist detachment in a sense. It’s an incredibly useful thing to do. I mean that’s another thing that’s really
characteristic of modern people, especially if they’re smart. They think they think, first of all, and second,
they think that the things they think are true, and neither of those things are necessarily
true. And abandoning your belief in them makes you
much less rigid and much more able to expand your preconceptions or even radically change
them when the circumstances demand them. So the person has to be wanting to change,
in principle in a positive direction; they have to be willing to tell the truth. Then the next element of Rogerian psychotherapy
is something that he called “unconditional positive regard,” and unconditional positive
regard, in the Rogerian tradition, is something like radical acceptance. It’s actually a hallmark of modern child
rearing techniques. You should wholeheartedly accept all aspects
of the person’s being. Now, Rogers believed that, or posited that,
partly because he also believed in—what was it called—conditions of worth. Here’s a condition of worth: “I don’t
like you when you act like that.” So imagine you tell a child that—“I don’t
like you when you act like that”—and maybe you tell them that about a bunch of things
that they do. But maybe those are integral parts of the
child’s being and by making your lack of acceptance known you make it impossible for
the child to incorporate those aspects of his organismal experience into his self-concept. You can see echoes of the superego/ego idea
there. And so Rogers would say, “Well, if someone
comes into psychotherapy and experiences unconditional positive regard, that means that they’ll
be able to reveal those elements of their organismic experience that had been rejected,
say, by the social world and themselves; experience them; and then potentially incorporate them
within the self concept and that that’s going to be a good thing, because Rogers is
a great believer in the natural inevitability of positive transformation if you set that
up as your goal. He also believes that that should be your
goal and that it’s actually your natural goal if, for example, you haven’t been subjected
to arbitrary conditions of worth. Now, I’m going to read you something that
Rogers wrote, which is quite interesting, and I think I found it extremely effective. Oh yes, that’s another thing I should mention. There is one other important assumption in
the idea of self-actualization. The other thing that Rogers tried to ensure
that his clients developed is autonomy and independence. Now, for Rogers, there was very little difference
between the move towards autonomy and personal independence and the process of self-actualization. Now, given that we’re looking back at Rogers’
work fifty years later, you might ask yourself if autonomy and independence is a necessary
precondition for psychological health, because you could make the case that productive interdependence
and more communal orientation is equally healthy—but that’s not a Rogerian presupposition. So his ideal is the fully-functioning individual. So here’s his hypothesis with regards to
psychotherapy: “Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive
communications, we may say that the greater the communicated congruence of experience,
awareness and behavior on the part of one individual, the more the ensuing relationship
will involve a tendency toward reciprocal communication with the same qualities, mutually
accurate understanding of the communications, improved psychological adjustment and functioning
in both parties, and mutual satisfaction in the relationship.” Okay, so let’s unpack that. “Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to
be in contact and to receive communications.” Well, the first thing you might say is that’s
pretty much the hallmark of a relationship, right, because if you’re not in contact,
well clearly you don’t have a relationship, and if you are in contact but you’re not
communicating you probably don’t have a relationship either. So and, you know, that also begs the question
of exactly what a relationship is for, and that’s something that’s very much worth
considering because people don’t really usually know what a relationship is for. They certainly know that as a general rule
they’re going to pursue them but they don’t really have any idea, in some sense, what
the optimal state is or what the desired final state should be. Now of course the desired final state fifty
years ago was marriage, but it’s certainly the case now that most people who are couples
aren’t married. Now, you might ask yourself, “Well, what’s
the utility of a relationship and what’s the utility of a long-term relationship?” Well, a Rogerian answer to that would be:
The more based on trust the relationship is, the more likely that you’re going to be
in contact and receive communications, and then, as a consequence of that, you’re going
to become better and better at representing your organismal experience within your self-concept
and that’s going to facilitate your moment towards self-awareness and self-actualization. It’s a two brains are better than one idea. So we say, “Well, we established a relationship,
okay, and the goal of our relationship is to make things better.” And the way we make things better is by telling
the truth as you see it. So, remember, this is a phenomenological theory
and so the truth that Rogers is talking about isn’t object truth, and I suspect that that’s
at least in part because establishing objective truth within the confines of a relationship
is—I think it’s technically impossible. And we talked about that before, because each
interaction between the members of a couple, or people in any relationship is contaminated,
in a sense, by all of the other interactions they’ve ever had plus everything they bring
to bear on the situation, and there’s just no untangling that objectively. You know, “What did you mean when you said
that?” Well, God, you know, you can argue about that
until the point of divorce and ten years afterwards, you know, without ever coming to a satisfactory
conclusion. Alright, “The greater the communicated congruence
of experience, awareness, and behavior on the part of one individual, the more the ensuing
relationship will involve a tendency toward reciprocal communication with the same qualities.” Okay, so here’s the idea: You go see a psychotherapist—a
Rogerian psychotherapist. At least in principle, this is someone who’s
mastered, or is attempting to master these basic modes of being. So what they’re going to do is they’ll
tell you, “I’m going to tell you the truth as I see it,” and so they way I see that
happening in psychotherapy is that when someone comes to see me I listen to them, and that
means that I’m not distracted by anything else. I’m not thinking about anything else. I’m not thinking about what I’m going
to say next. I’m not thinking about the things I have
to do today. I’m not thinking about the last time I saw
this person. I’m not allowing my attention to wander
away from the person, and then I’m watching them and listening to them at the same time—and
those are the same things because to really listen to someone you also have to watch them. Because then you subceive perhaps, or perceive,
all the non-verbal elements of communication that go along—well, partly with voice tone
but partly with eye direction and partly with very subtle transformations of facial gestures. So sometimes, for example, I see on my clients
that they’ll all of a sudden turn into a child. It’s very interesting. It’s like they’ll be recounting some experience—it’s
like fixation from a Freudian perspective. They’ll be describing some experience from
the distant past and for a second their expression will approximate who they were when they were
six-years-old. It’s really something remarkable to see,
and you can see these things if you really pay attention. And then as they talk I’m watching what’s
happening inside me as I listen to their words, and all sorts of things will happen. Sometimes I’ll get an image or sometimes
I’ll get a memory of something we talked about before. Or sometimes I’ll notice that what they’re
saying right now is different than something they said five minutes ago and so then I’ll
say, “Well, wait a second, you know. I’m trying to understand what you’re telling
me and I noticed that you just said this, and it seems to imply this, but then, you
know, a couple of minutes ago, when we were talking about that, then you said this and
I don’t see how those two things are the same.” And I’m not doing that because I want them
to rectify the paradox; I’m doing that being I want to understand what they are saying. And if someone says A to you and then they
say B, you don’t know what they’re saying. And so the question is for clarification. There’s no other direction than that. And then maybe, you know, I’ll have a little
image, like maybe the fragment of a dream, and I’ll say, “Wait a second. When you said what you just said this is what
I experienced.” And then maybe we’ll talk for a while about
what that might mean and I can say to them what—so, for example, sometimes people will
come to my office and they’ll do all sorts of strange things. Like I had one client who had psychosomatic
epilepsy, and one of the first times I saw her she had a seizure in my office. And I was watching her and it didn’t really
matter to me that she was having a seizure. And I thought, “That’s pretty weird,”
because normally when someone’s having a seizure it’s like you get affected by it,
right? I mean there are sensations that emerge in
your midsection, and there are thoughts of emergency, you know, because your body, in
some sense, is mimicking their body—which is what your body does all the time when you’re
talking to people—and that produces a sense of urgency. And I sort of just watched her have this seizure
and I thought, “Oh, it’s not real; it’s not a real seizure.” But she was very good at it and, you know,
as far as she was concerned she couldn’t tell if the seizures were real or not. And sometimes if you have psychogenic epilepsy
you’ve had an epileptic seizure at one point that was genuine. Well, it’s exceptionally complicated and
it’s not easy to develop psychogenic epilepsy, but she had developed it and part of the reason
was that she thought that—she was toying with the idea that existence as a psychiatric
patient would require less effort and responsibility. And so she got tangled up at one point with
one of the mental hospitals and they diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia, which is
not something I would recommend—especially if you don’t actually have it—because
once you’ve got the diagnosis, well are you really going to know? What’s going to happen, eh? You do something like that—you have a psychogenic
epileptic seizure and a variety of other symptoms—they’re the consequences of a very complex complex
in Jungian terms. There’s a secondary motivation in Freudian
terms. You go through with the whole routine then
you end up in a psych hospital, and you see four experts and they tell you you have paranoid
schizophrenia. Do you really think you’re going to not
believe that? Or at least ten percent of you is going to
believe it. You’re going to wonder after that. And if another twenty people tell you that
and you’re put on medication, which you could easily be, then a year later, well,
you might still not have paranoid schizophrenia but you are not going to be doing very well. So, well that’s a good example of what happens
when your self-concept and organismic valuing systems aren’t working carefully in tandem. Anyways, so someone might be telling me a
story that’s, you know, about something terrible that happened to them and I’ll
just be sitting there like a brick wall. It’s like, “You’re not affecting me.” And sometimes I’ll tell people that. It’s like: “I don’t know why, you know,
that’s a pretty terrible story but I’m having no emotional response to it at all. Do you have any idea why that might be?” Well then, you know, often people aren’t
very happy when you tell them that, and that’s fine. They can be unhappy with that. That’s perfectly okay, but the thing is
now they know that there’s at least one person that they’ve communicated with that’s
actually telling them the truth who is actually not affected by their story. Because, look, if someone sits down beside
you and they tell you a terrible story, the probability that you’re going to tell them
that that had no effect on you is basically zero because it’s really rude not to be
negatively affected by someone who’s telling you a very sad story. But if you’re negatively affected by it
and it’s not true then you’re not doing them any good at all; all you’re doing is
providing them with evidence to maintain what could easily become a delusion if they worked
on it long enough. By contrast, sometimes people will come into
my office and they’ll tell me something that just seems trivial and it’ll make me
tear up, which mean I can actually feel emotions. It’ll make me tear up and it’s just some
thing that they barely allude to, you know. Like a client a while back told me that—we
had had a session, a family session, where I had suggested to some of the members of
this person’s family that things might go better for them and their child, who was one
of my clients, if for the next two weeks what they practiced doing was watching each other’s
behaviour during the day and finding one thing that they could make a positive comment about. Now, and this isn’t a game. Like if you play it as a game then it isn’t
going to work. If you’re going to do this properly, what
you do is you watch and then you notice when a person does something that actually makes
you feel positively towards them, and then you tell them, “You did this.” It has to be specific. It can’t be at the end of the day: “Well,
you were pretty good today.” It’s like: “No, that’s not going to
work, man.” You have to notice something they actually
did. It’s usually something trivial like: “I
really appreciate the fact that you took your dirty dinner plate off the table and rinsed
it off and put it in the dishwasher.” It’s like, you think that’s so damn trivial
it’s hardly worth commenting on. It’s like, no no no, it’s not at all;
it’s exactly the specific thing that you comment on if it did in fact make you happy. You know, and you can think about that in
behavioural terms. You could say if you something to do something
that you like you should tell them when they do things that you like so that they what
you like. But, of course, that means that you’re putting
yourself on the line too, right, because if the person knows what you like then they can
withhold it from you so you’re not going to do that unless you trust them. You’re really not. So, you know, you might be in a relationship—you
might be in a marriage—where never once during the whole bloody marriage do you ever
tell the other person what actually makes you happy. It’s like, that’s stupid by the way. So, like if you want have a really miserable
time of it that’s an excellent way to start. You could also add to that the presumption
that if they really loved you they’d know what you liked, which is also—
Your partner’s no smarter than you, generally speaking, and you don’t have a clue what’s
going to make them happy so I don’t know why you’d expect them to—especially if
they’re male—why you’d expect them to return the favour. So then you teach them, you know. Like it’ll probably take four years. It’s like: “I like it when you do this,”
and then, of course, they won’t so you might have to mention it again in a month. You might think, “Well, it’s going to
take eighteen months to train this person, at least.” I mean they’re smart; they’re smarter
than a dog but not much smarter. So you have to use repetition and you have
to be judicious about. And if you do that, and the other person is
also doing that to you, and you both know that you’re doing that, and you’re both
trying to make things better, then you’re going to communicate about it and then with
any luck things will get better. But that means you actually have to want things
to get better, and that’s part of the problem, of course, because not everybody wants things
to get better and there’s a part of everyone that would be just as happy if they didn’t
get better. So anyways, Rogers’ idea is that if you
communicate properly with the person that you’re in the relationship with that you
can model proper being, in some sense, and that at least you can attempt to model. And then as you attempt it you’ll get better
and better at it and as you get better at it the other person will get better at it. And that works too. So I had a client who was a very anxious person
so when the person first came to see me they couldn’t even talk on the phone, and now
they’re acting publicly—they’re acting in public. And that’s been the consequence of about
seven years of, I would say, Rogerian conversations where almost all that I did was listen. Now, I don’t quite get the unconditional
positive regard thing, although I know why Rogers said it, and his idea that arbitrary
conditions of worth can make someone pathological are true. But I think a more nuanced sense of unconditional
positive regard is what happens as you watch the person and they tell you something, and
as they’re telling it to you you can see a little part of them sort of come alive. And that often happens when their face loses
a fair bit of its rigidity and you can see more of what they were like when they were
a child sort of peeping through. So their face sort of opens up. You can think, “Aha! That was really good for that person. Whatever they’ve been telling me that they’ve
been doing, that was right on the right track,” and then you could say, “Look, I noticed
when you talked about this, you know, your face relaxed, you didn’t look as anxious,
you were smiling—and it was genuine smile—for like a second or two there it looked like
you were doing well and you were happy.” It’s like: “Let’s do a bunch more of
that,” because you know if you see in somebody that they’re capable of experiencing that,
then you could help them experience that more, and that’s the purpose of a long term relationship. It’s that you have your weaknesses and inadequacies
and you can’t think yourself out of them by yourself, partly because they color the
way that you think, and so you need somebody else to bang yourself up against—to contend
with—so that all the knots in your soul can get ironed out. And hypothetically you’re doing the same
thing for the other person and then both of you are on an upwards spiral, and, in some
sense, that’s the core theory of Rogerian psychotherapy. It’s like: Genuine, honest communication
can heal people, and genuine dishonest communication can make them pathological. And in some sense I think Rogers got closer
to the truth—if you inferred Rogers’ presupposition, that’s as close to the truth as any psychotherapist
has got. Deceit makes people pathological, and that’s
true. A lot of—and Jung noticed this as well—a
lot of what you’re doing in psychotherapy and in any genuine relationship is a moral
endeavour. You’re trying to make things better, and
if the other person is deceiving themselves, or lying, or failing to become aware of things
that they should become aware of, they’re going to get bent and twisted out of shape
and then they’re not going to be congruent with their body or the broader world. And then they’re going to suffer, and then
that will cascade then all sorts of things will start to happen. And, you know, that’s the path to perdition
and an involuntary trip to the underworld. When we meet again I think I’ll show you
a little clip of Rogerian psychotherapy because a woman in the 1950’s agreed to be filmed,
which had a dramatic effect on her life by the way. But it provides a nice real world illustration
of what Rogers is doing when he’s trying to listen to people.