https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=V9Ql5V7-OQo
So, the grades will be posted on Blackboard as soon as they’re ready, and I’ll open up the Blackboard so you can see them all this way. Alright. So, on to the next round of clinicians. We’re going to focus mostly today on Carl Rogers. I’m going to start with some background. Carl Rogers was a phenomenologist, and so it’s useful to know what that means, you know, because you hear people use words all the time like, well, maybe not all the time. Probably not in the grocery store usually. Like phenomenology or existentialism and postmodernism and structuralism and all those things, and you know, it’s not, it’s frequently the case that it isn’t that easy to figure out what they’re talking about, and sometimes that’s because they don’t know, you know, because it’s actually quite difficult to make a reasonable conceptual distinction between all those different modes of thinking. And phenomenology came out of philosophy, and its earliest advocate was a guy named Edmund Husserl, and its most famous proponent was probably Heidegger, and Heidegger got in lots of trouble because he ended up supporting the Nazis, at least to some degree. So that’s pretty good reason to get in trouble, all things considered, you know. Although you know, most people did that in the 30s in Germany, so not that that’s any excuse obviously. It’s hard to exactly get your head around what the phenomenologists are talking about. I was reading about David Chalmers this morning, I don’t know how many of you know about David Chalmers, but he’s a philosopher who started the Tucson Conventions on consciousness, and Chalmers, I’m not sure what I think about Chalmers, he’s very charismatic, he’s got away with words, and setting up those conventions has done a great deal for the study of consciousness. But sometimes I think that what he pointed out to scientists was obvious. It’s funny, you know, when psychology was primarily behaviourist, which was back in the 50s, it came as a big shock to psychologists when certain psychologists started to talk about cognition, they called that the cognitive revolution. You know, I think it was obvious to everybody but psychologists at that point that people fought, and I think it was perhaps the same situation with philosophers, it was pretty obvious to everybody that consciousness was a tough nut to crack, but the philosophers had kind of ignored it, and Chalmers brought it back into the academic mainstream. The phenomenologists are really all about consciousness, they just accept it as a fact. Rather than trying to deny its existence because it can’t be easily reduced to its material substrate. Chalmers’ big point was that he couldn’t understand why evolution couldn’t have produced creatures exactly like us who had no conscious awareness, he called them zombies fundamentally. He said that the existence of consciousness is an enduring mystery. Well I think that’s true, I’m not sure that we’ve got anywhere in terms of figuring out exactly what consciousness is despite a lot of time and effort put into it, and despite a lot of tremendous amount of work done on the brain. But anyways, the phenomenologists, they just took it as a fact. Now Heidegger believed that Western philosophy had lost its way really since the time of the Greeks, and he thought that philosophy’s primary field of focus should be being itself, not reality, but being. And it’s not easy to understand what he meant by being, but the phenomenal field, the idea of a phenomenal field somewhat captures it. So for Heidegger, reality was what you experienced. So he sort of tipped the tables, instead of presuming an objective world and then deriving this objective from it, he presumed that the entirety of your experiences were real. And that included your emotions and your felt motivational states, and your dreams and your fantasies, and even your delusions. Now that doesn’t mean that people like Heidegger thought that all the elements of lived reality belonged in the same category. So if you thought that dreams and reality that you share with other people were indistinguishable from one another, you’d be just as pathological to a phenomenologist as to anyone else. But they were trying to get back to the central mystery of life, which is that there is something rather than nothing, I suppose, in that we experience it. And that’s the place where Roger starts. One of the presumptions of the Rogerians is that in order to help someone, you have to put yourself in their shoes fundamentally. So you have to try to see the world from their perspective. And that means adopting the viewpoint, it means adopting the reality that manifests itself to them, so that you can develop an empathic understanding and a body-focused understanding of the person that you’re talking to. So let’s talk about Rogers for a minute. He was a devout fundamentalist Protestant. And I think that’s important to know because a lot of his thinking has a very strong Protestant flavour. I mean, the reason I concentrate on such things and the philosophical background of these thinkers is because you have to understand the axioms of the thinker that you’re dealing with, or you actually don’t understand them at all. When you’re assessing the axiomatic presuppositions of the thinker, you’re usually outside the thinker’s thought in some sense, right, because you’re looking at axioms. But you don’t get it unless you know the axioms. And so, Carl Rogers’ thought was deeply grounded in his Protestantism, but his father in particular was a scientific farmer and applied the scientific method on the farm that he grew up in. And so Rogers had a devout fundamentalist background of the sort that was more typical in the 30s and the 40s, but he also had a powerful understanding of the scientific method and practical observations of its utility. So his first academic training was at the Union Theological Seminary, and the mission of that seminary was to evangelize the world in their generation. If I remember correctly, it was when he was on a boat to China to serve as a missionary that he first started to question the absolute reality of his Protestant beliefs. It isn’t that he abandoned them particularly, it’s that he incorporated them into an approach to psychotherapy that fulfilled all the preconditions for this. There’s a striving towards a kind of interpersonal perfection that goes along with Protestantism. There’s an idea that the most important realization of the most fundamental reality is to be had in direct and honest communication between two people. And two or more people. That’s a place where you might say, if you’re thinking about it symbolically, that the living word emerges. And Rogers’ thinking is deeply, deeply rooted in that kind of conception. It’s partly that he believed that if you could integrate yourself properly, if you could put yourself together in some sense at every level of analysis, then you’d be able to exist and communicate in a way that was, there’s a Piagetian flavor to this, that was optimally beneficial to you but also optimally beneficial to other people at the same time. And a lot of that would emerge in your interactions with each other in communication. So here’s something to think about. I think this is a way of approaching what Rogers was up to. Imagine how you use words. Now you could use words instrumentally. Let’s start with that. Imagine that you want something from someone. And then you might think, well, how can I phrase my argument so that I’m going to get that from this person? And then you might think, well, what sort of argument would appeal to that person and what buttons can I push and how can I get what I want? And then you’re using words in an instrumental way. You’re using them as tools to obtain what you desire from other people. Now I think if you do that completely, you’re a psychopath. I mean that because a psychopath has no room for you at all. It’s about him or her. And you’re there to be used as an instrumental target. Now I’m not saying that every time someone uses language instrumentally, they’re acting like a psychopath. But that’s the logical conclusion to that form of language use. Now then you might think, well, you can imagine little kids trying to do that to their parents, right? Siblings will often collude. They’ll have a little conspiratorial conversation about how to approach one parent or the other usually by isolating the parents. That’s a good strategy. And then they’ll phrase their requests so that they can extract out the desired benefit. I follow these pick-up artists online. I’ve been very interested in their use of psychology. And they are instrumental language users, right? So their trick is they’re developing a whole little potpourri of verbal tricks that they use in attempts to seduce. It’s a very narrow focus and it’s instrumental language. It’s as if the personhood of the target is irrelevant fundamentally. So it’s a fairly pathological… it can become pathological very easy. So then you might say, well, how would you use language if you weren’t using it instrumentally? Because you have to have a career and you have to be goal-oriented and you have to be aimed towards things. And so since you have to be goal-oriented, how can it be other than that you would use language instrumentally? Well, the Rogerian position would be that you should try to become aware of the totality of your subjective experience so that not only do you feel it in an embodied sense, but that you represent it. And the representation would be mostly in terms of articulation. It isn’t clear that Rogers considered other forms of representation, but for Rogers, the movement towards health is an integrative process and it’s very body-focused. But the outcome of that integrative process, which Rogers would say is the ability to live the good life, is that your language is no longer instrumental. What you’re doing instead is attempting to state the truth as you see it, because of course your truth is a partial truth, obviously. The best you can do is, well, I really think the best you can do is not lie, because you can’t tell the truth because you’re too damn stupid, right? You don’t know enough to tell the truth. But you can certainly do your best to represent what you know as clearly as you possibly can in your communication with other people. And so Rogers believed that it was the moral responsibility of the therapist to do that personally and then that to the degree that that was being done in the therapy relationship, in the therapeutic relationship, that that in and of itself would be healing. And so basically, Rogers’ theory is that honest communication heals. Now, you know, that’s quite an interesting theory. You know, it’s not completely unaligned from Freud’s earlier claims, right? Because Freud basically presumed that it was… Freud didn’t put so much of a moral element on it. He really viewed the person more as being trapped between titanic opposing forces. The id underneath and the superego on top and poorly legals are crunched up in the middle. And as a consequence of being pulled and prodded and crushed by those titanic forces, pathology was likely to emerge. And he talked about repression, but Freud tended to view repression as an unconscious process. For Rogers, the moral element of the therapeutic process is much clearer, I believe. And most of the time when you listen to Rogers or you read what he had to say, the injunctions that he’s laying out are moral injunctions. Now it’s quite interesting, because you don’t necessarily think of psychotherapy as a moral endeavour. And I really never thought about it that way fully until I read Jung. I was reading Rogers at the same time. But Jung laid out the proposition in his book that most of the problems, many of the problems that people came to see a therapist about were actually moral problems. And they were moral problems of various sorts. Now sometimes the person was in trouble because they had done something seriously, seriously wrong. He had one client, if I remember correctly, and he discovered, if I remember correctly, that she had killed her children. And she did that when they were young. She let them become exposed to tuberculosis, I think it was. She didn’t take the proper precautions. And the reason she did that was because she wanted to marry someone and he wasn’t very interested in her children. So you might consider that a moral problem. Apparently it was weighing on her conscience, as it might well. Now it’s a strange thing because in some sense what she did was turn a blind eye to something she could have prevented. In legal terms that’s known as willful blindness. But she knew, whatever that means, well there’s lots of different levels of knowing, right? You can know something in your body, you can know something in your imagination, you can know something in articulated form. So the whole issue of knowing is very complicated. But Rogers definitely believed, as far as I can tell, that there was a moral dimension to life, that it was identifiable, that in some sense it was linear, that it had an observable which was the continual integration of experience within the phenomenal field, the ironing out of contradictions within the phenomenal field. So you might think, well what happens when you feel one way and you say something else? I mean you’re all perfectly familiar with that experience. In fact, my experience with people has been that, and this is another issue of instrumental use of language. You say, well what are you using your language for? Well to get what you want. Well that can be consciously manipulative, and maybe we’ll say, well that’s what the psychopath is like, except the psychopath is not only consciously manipulative, he’s also unconsciously manipulative because he’s been practicing it for like three decades. So all the little machines in his head are deceptive too and they run on automatic. So he’ll just lie just to see if he can pull one over on you because that demonstrates that not only is he smarter than you, but that you deserve to be victimized because you’re such an idiot. But people use instrumental language like that not only consciously to get what they want, but it’s something that we definitely think of as characteristic, for example, of teenagers. I mean there isn’t a teen movie that’s been made in the last 50 years, I don’t think, that doesn’t deal with the negative consequences of using instrumental language. Basically the teen is put in some position where they’re being pulled by maybe various social forces, different friendship groups, or there’s a contradictory relationship between what their friends want and their parents want, or what their friends want and their school wants, or what they want and their friends want, or what the school wants. So all of these things are pulling and pushing in different directions, and the directions are essentially, in some sense the directions are moral because they’re all about what to do. And the plot of the movie is how the teenager, it’s usually a Rogerian plot, it’s usually about how the teenager comes to more, to fuller self-realization, right, and that they’re able to stave off the temptations that are posed sometimes by the authorities so they don’t become too obedient, and sometimes by their peers so that they don’t become only a reflection of peer pressure. Question? I was just going to say, would peer pressure be a good example of something that would cause the use of instrumental language? Absolutely. Peer pressure is absolutely that. And so if you’re using language to fit in, well that’s also instrumental use of language, and for Rogers that would be one of the sources of pathology. Now it’s very much worth taking this seriously. So here’s an example that I thought about a lot. What do you do if you’re at work and someone tells you to do something that you don’t want to do? And I don’t mean that, forget, assume you’re disciplined, you know, assume that you’re not just lazy and worthless and that’s why you don’t want to do it, and you want to ask yourself that first, right, because maybe you’re just being lazy and worthless and you should pull yourself together and do the thing, you know. But failing that, let’s say that you’re being asked to do something that you’re finding, you’re having a very difficult time to get motivated to do, so that’d be one clue, and that it’s also making you uneasy. So you’re waking up in the middle of the night and you’re being anxious and it’s running through your mind and what should you do? Well, it’s your job, someone who’s in the hierarchy above you is telling you to do it, maybe you should just do it. Well then you might ask yourself, well why can’t you just go ahead and do it? You know, you might say, well maybe it’s quasi-criminal and you’re afraid of getting caught, but let’s forget about that for a minute. Let’s assume that the probability, maybe it’s a low-level moral transgression, it’s not precisely illegal, and even so the probability that you’re going to get caught is very low. Why would it bother you? And should you take that seriously? Now Rogers would claim that the reason it would bother you is because it would make the structure of your self-system inconsistent. So imagine you’re trying to organize a group of people to do some task, you know, like maybe they’re in a row and you have to fill in a hole in the road and so you have to put people in a row and you hand rocks down the line. You know, if you’ve got one person in there who’s trying to put rocks, make the rocks go the other way or dropping them or something like that, well then obviously the entire structure is not going to function properly and it’s because there’s an internal inconsistency in it. You know, it’s a fundamental presupposition of logic, it’s maybe the most fundamental principle of communication that a thing can’t be itself and something else at the same time. That’s the principle of non-contradiction, right? And so the hypothesis here would be that you have to follow the principle of non-contradiction with regards to the organization of your own self. The self would be, Rogers thinks about that as a differentiated field, sub-field of the phenomenal field, right? So you’re always experiencing things and part of what you experience is the you at the centre of that and that’s the self as far as Rogers is concerned. And the proposition would be you have to organize the self in a non-contradictory manner or, well, or what? Well, or you feel negative emotion. Now he would think about that as anxiety in general. Yes? Well, that might work. You know, I mean, that’s a very good and complicated question. Because what you’re asking is, well, why can’t you rationalize effectively? That’s really… That’s a postmodern theory, I would say, in some sense. Because the postmodernists like to claim that there’s nothing outside the text, right? And that things in some sense are infinitely malleable and that the malleability comes as a consequence of the different narratives that you might weave. But Rogers would point out that, well, the first thing he’d point out is that’s stupid, which it is. I mean, there’s all sorts of things that are characteristic of your experience that have a non-text-like phenomenology. You know, like I think it’s very, very difficult to claim that pain is textual, you know? And we do know that you can manipulate the way an organism feels pain quite extensively. So for example, if you whack a dog on the nose with a newspaper every time it goes to It will starve to death. You can teach it not to eat very rapidly. And so what you’re doing is you’re teaching the dog that hunger is punishing, and then it transforms hunger into anxiety, and then it won’t eat. So the reason I’m telling you that is because even something as fundamental as hunger, which you might think about as a basic phenomena, can be modulated by learning. But there are limits to that. There are evident limits to that. Now, I think the problem with weaving a narrative is that even if it’s complex and sophisticated, and so you’ve convinced yourself, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the actions and perceptions undertaken as a consequence of that formulation are going to be commensurate with the rest of your personality. It’s a big risk, you know? And I think it is the risk that people run when they tell themselves or act out a deep falsehood. Now, because for Rogers, you could also act out falsehoods, right? In fact, the philosophers call that a performative contradiction. That’s when you say one thing and do another. It’s a form of lie, but it’s an embodied lie. Rogers was very cognizant of embodiment as a central human feature. So he was very concerned about the fact that the representational structures had to take into account the realities of the underlying biology, so those would be felt states in a sense. So I think the Rogerian answer is you can’t get away with it that easily. What that will do is it will produce contradictions as you move forward, and those contradictions will unsettle you, either in a minor way or in a deep way. Now, as far as I can tell by Rogers never really formalized a theory about why something is deep and why something was shallow in terms of its misrepresentation, but we’ve already talked about that. If you think about the hierarchical structure that I’ve showed you many times, the idea there is that the higher level of the abstraction that you mess around with, the more of your personality you pathologize. I’ve been thinking this week, too, that that hierarchy—you know the one I’ve showed you many times, I believe I have anyways, little eggs in rows? I think that’s the structure of the unconscious, actually. And you mess about with that at your peril because you’re programming your own perceptions and your actions. And so the Rogerian presupposition—this is why I’m talking about the presuppositions that underlie this thinking, because the Rogerian approach is based on a deep presupposition, which is that honest integration matters. Now you could say, well, perhaps not. It’s like, well, that’s been the question that people have been debating since the beginning of time. But my experience as a therapist, just so you know, I’ve never seen anyone get away with anything. I think every time you do something that you know isn’t right, you’re going to get walloped for it sooner or later. Now you may have blinded yourself so badly because of your misapprehensions and deceptions that you can’t see the causal connection between what you did and the punishment. In fact, sometimes it takes years of psychotherapeutic investigation to lay out the causal narrative. But why would anybody ever think they can bend the structure of reality and get away with it? To me it’s like those plastic rulers, it’s like you can hold one of those in front of your nose and bend it forward and that’s fine, but as soon as you let go it’s going to hit you in the face. And so then you’re going to curse fate because you got hit in the face, but you bent the damn ruler. Yeah? I mean, look, I would say sometimes people are put into positions that unsettle them and they don’t know what to do. You know, they’re kind of, they’re screwed if they do this and they’re screwed if they do that and that’s all they can see to do. And people get put in those situations all the time. And I’m not really going to talk about those except that people really suffer for that. So, in reality what Rogers is talking about is a form of optimal organization, right? So it’s to be considered as the final goal in some sense, it’s what you’re working towards. I think it’s very difficult to live in a way so that you never encounter contradictions as you move forward. In fact, that’s precisely what does happen as you move forward. And it’s up to you on the fly to organize your response to those contradictions in a manner that doesn’t destabilize the entire structure. But you know, the entire structure is a strange thing because, again, Rogers has got a psychoanalytic. Well, it’s not exactly right. It’s complicated. The hierarchy that Rogers describes as characteristic of the self, this is something he doesn’t discuss that much. The hierarchy that you make of yourself is not independent of the way that you fit into hierarchies in the world. So really by hierarchically organizing yourself at the same time you’re hierarchically organizing the world. And so part of the problem is that if you destabilize yourself or if you come up with a suboptimal solution, there’s a twist there that’s going to follow you up. Now it may be the best that you’ve got. Sometimes that happens, you know. I’m not saying that you can always solve a problem in an optimal manner. You know, do you remember the movie Sophie’s Choice? Did you ever see that? It’s an old movie. Sophie, it’s a movie about Germany during the Nazi period. She had to choose which of her two children was going to be shot. Well, you know, it’s pretty hard to come up with an optimal solution to that problem, right? Rogers though didn’t really think that actual problems in life constituted psychopathology. That’s sort of more the existentialist, although he had an existential twist. He was thinking more that what constituted psychopathology per se instead of just plain ordinary suffering was the contradictions that arose because people failed to use their potential for articulation in a manner that continually fostered their integration. So he would say, well, to the degree that you were going to use instrumental language. It’s not a term he used, but it’s a good summary of his philosophy that you were bringing to bear on yourself and others around you unnecessary pain and suffering. And that was psychopathological. It’s psychopathological because it’s unnecessary because in principle it could be avoided. So that’s the idea. So the idea as well is that the organizing principle that brings you into this optimally functioning hierarchy is your commitment to truth, to accurately represent what it is that you experience. And that’s again, you know how Piaget talked about the fundamental truth as a process rather than as a state or a fact. It’s the case for Rogerian phenomenology as well, and you can kind of understand that because of course therapists are dealing with people, living people. Life is a process, not a state. And so Rogers was concentrating very much on the process, which he regarded as absolutely crucial, and believed that the process, the process properly implemented, would bring about the best possible organization and that would update that organization as necessary too. So it’s a radical idea, but I would also say that it’s fundamentally rooted in his Protestant Christianity because one of the tenets of Christianity is that the word orders chaos. And so that idea was lurking at the bottom of Roger’s conceptual structure. And you know, he was intelligent enough to articulate it fully in a modern way, but that’s still where it came from. Now it’s an older idea of Christianity. So. Now Rogers also believed some other things. And this is where I think he gets a little bit optimistic. But he’s no fool, so Rogers is one of those optimists you really have to contend with. Now he believed, and I think this is a classical Protestant belief as well, that what evil was basically the absence of good, and that people had a strong intrinsic impulse towards the good that you could help them realize. And the way you helped them realize that was by setting the preconditions for the emergence of that good. And he believed that the preconditions were the provision of a space for communication where there was no judgment in the sense of rejection. And so here’s the Rogerian theory with regards to therapeutic endeavor. Now the first thing is, and this seems critical, and I think Rogers was right about this, that the client has to want to change. And this is a funny thing about therapy, because my observation has been that it’s not something you can impose on people. Unless they’ve decided that things could be better, and that alterations in something they’re doing might make it better, it’s a non-starter. And so I’ve had clients who are court ordered to attend therapy, and that’s just a complete waste of time. Especially if they’re more on the psychopathic end of things, because you just, if they don’t want to change, they’re not going to learn. And this is actually another Rogerian principle, because Rogers had an educational philosophy as well, and the educational philosophy was students will not learn things that are not relevant to them. And so one of the teacher’s duties was to make the material at hand relevant, because that would help the student remember it. Why remember it if it’s not relevant? It’s one of the things I try to do in my lectures. I try to tell people when I’m lecturing why they should know this, and the fundamental answer always, if you push it down far enough, is that if you know this, your life will go better and so will the life of people around you. So you should listen, because then there’s some things that are sharp and pointy that you won’t run into while you’re wandering around in the fog. And that’s the fundamental issue. It’s necessary to know these things. And so if you’re dealing with someone who hasn’t decided that there’s something wrong and that they have something to do about it, and that maybe they could change and that would make things better, you’re not going anywhere. And Rogers would also say that’s actually precondition for a relationship, period. Because he didn’t really make much of a distinction between a therapeutic relationship and a genuine relationship, because he thought that genuine relationships were therapeutic. And so one of the principles that you can extract from that is that if you’re in a relationship, one useful proposition is that, well, you’re pretty perfect, but you’re probably not quite as perfect as you could be. And so it’s possible that your partner, no matter how deeply flawed they are, might now and then have something to say to you that would, if you incorporate it, would bring you to an even higher state of perfection. And so that means you have to listen. And it’s worse than that, and this again is a Rogerian observation. You might have to help them criticize you, because maybe they’re not very good at it. And so there’s something they’re trying to tell you in their stumbly way, and it’s an actual thing, but they can’t articulate it. And so it would be easy for you, especially if you’re trying to use language instrumentally, and to get away with it, just to, well, you could even make fun of the way they’re poorly articulating the problem. That’s a really good one, because then you can convince them not to do such things in the future. But if you take the other stance, which is, well, I’ve got some things to learn and you’ve got some things to learn and you’ve got some things to teach me and I’ve got some things to teach you, and God only knows when that’s going to happen, but it might happen. So the object of the conversation is for each person to help the other person make their point. And that’s a lot different than winning the argument. And I can tell you one thing. You will not win an argument with any intimate partner ever, because you’re not playing the game of the argument. You’re playing the game of iterated arguments across time. And so if you win an argument, you just set up another one. Winning and solving the problem aren’t the same thing. So from a Rogerian perspective, winning would be the maintenance of your current self-structure at the cost of failure to integrate some disintegrated element of the phenomenological realm. It would be the unhappiness of your partner. That might be one of them. Now if you win the argument, that’s the rationalization issue fundamentally. You don’t have to change, but the fact is you do have to change because the way you are is giving rise to this situation and that’s not going to change unless you fix it. So winning an argument and fixing something, those are completely different things. You fix the thing, it goes away. You know, couples have to have conflict because there’s no difference between conflict and thinking. Thinking is a form of war. It’s just that you make it an interior form of war, right? You can’t have a couple without conflict because life is different, difficult, and people differ from one another. So they have different value structures. And so you can’t just ignore that. You have to set up a dialogue because it’s not necessarily obvious who’s right. Of course, Rogers believed that in the therapeutic realm too. So he thought of therapy as something that emerged as a consequence of the adoption of certain axiomatic presuppositions, and those were things could be better than they are and you could make them that way, and that’s also true for me. And then the next presumption is, well maybe we can figure out how to do that with collaborative communication. So Rogers believed that the therapist was just as transformed during the therapeutic process as the person. In fact, if that wasn’t happening, then whatever was happening wasn’t the kind of healing therapy that Rogers would like to have happen. And he also said that’s, I’ll read you something he said later, but he also pointed out quite strongly that that’s why people don’t really like to listen. You know, like maybe there’s some flaw in your self-structure at some fundamental level, like the axiomatic level. You know, maybe you’re narcissistic, that’d be a good one. And you know, if you listen to people, they’re going to tell you you’re narcissistic. Well, you don’t want to find that out because it’s going to blow a huge hole in your self-structure. That’s not very fun, but hypothetically that beats running into the obstacles that you will run into if you’re narcissistic repeatedly as you move forward through life. So you can either live with your flaws or correct them. That’s the, and the pathway to correction is dialogue, communication. So now the next part of the Rogerian therapeutic process, yes, yes? What’s the difference between genuine criticism of self-structure, or genuinely giving your perspective, or just arguing a point about it? Well that’s a good question. Let’s see if we can formulate that. So the first difference might be, well what’s the outcome we’re looking for? Let’s think about that. Let’s think about that in the context of an intimate relationship, a familial relationship. So you have a wife, let’s say, and you’ve got some kids. What are you up to? What do you want? Hopefully try to make things better. Okay, so that’s one thing. So we’re trying to establish the domain of the argument. We’re going to try to make things better. What would better look like, you think? Okay, so there’s something, okay, so that’s a Rogerian presupposition, is that part of what you’re doing when you’re making things better is to decrease the probability that negative emotion will arise. Short term or long term? Okay, so that’s an interesting thing because what if you have to experience a tremendous amount of short term pain in order to make long term progress? Okay, okay, okay. Well I’m going to address your question completely from a Piagetian perspective but that’s okay because it works for Rogers as well, it’s just easier to explain. Freedom from unnecessary suffering in the short, medium, and long term across as many people as you can manage. So we’ll say you can start with you and your family. Okay, how are you going to do that? You don’t know. That’s what you have to talk about. You can’t have that conversation until you’ve got that framework, right? And it’s very, very tricky because in the midst of the argument there’s going to be tremendous temptation to oppress and deceive and humiliate and treat with contempt and hurt and punish and threaten, all of those things, right? And that’s partly reactivity in the short term and then that’s not properly integrated into the overarching hierarchical structure. So you’ve got to keep bringing yourself back to that. It’s like, why should you control your impulses? Well because they’re manifestation in the present, they’re spontaneous and impulsive manifestation in the present, well although that may be very, it may carry with it a feeling of freedom and power, maybe destroying the very structure that’s going to provide you with peace and stability over the medium and long run. So it’s again, it’s the idea of contradiction. Now if we’re having a discussion, okay so let’s say, we’ll do this in a very local fashion, it’s like. Well let’s say you’re having a discussion with your partner about who’s going to cook dinner. Okay. You think, that’s a simple discussion, it’s like, it’s not a simple discussion, it’s a horrible discussion. It’s where the war between the genders manifests itself. It’s one of the places. And to solve it, weirdly enough, you actually have to solve the war between the genders. Well good luck with that. There it is right in your house, right? It’s like a snake in a garden. There’s no getting rid of it. Okay so then you might think, well what’s our aim for dinner? Well, do we want to have wretched, miserable, rotten food served by a resentful person to a bunch of ungrateful rats who complain and snivel? It’s like, no, let’s assume we don’t want that. Okay good, well we know what we’re not aiming at. It’s like, alright, who should cook dinner and win and what are the rules by which we decide that? Huh, that’s a tough one. Because you can return to roles, right? That’s why people have roles, so they don’t have to have stupid conversations like this, but that time is gone. Okay so what do you do when there’s no role? Well I could make you do it, maybe. You know, I could either do it physically by force or I could just intimidate you or I could make life miserable for you if you don’t do it. You know, there’s lots of ways of using power. Problem with that is, you’re not without your own weapons. And for every step I take towards making you miserable, you’ll get your chance. So probably we don’t want to use force, plus that’s not so good for the kids, you know, from a role model perspective, and hypothetically we’ll want good things to be happening to them. So tyranny looks like it’s out, and I don’t want you to subjugate yourself because maybe very agreeable, let’s say that, because that’s often a problem in communication between men and women. The guy’s more disagreeable than the woman is, and so if he jacks up the level of conflict, she’ll back off because she doesn’t like conflict for all sorts of different reasons. So that’s another way of winning, except then the person who loses is all resentful and you end up with horrible, miserable food fed to warring partners who are complaining and struggling. It’s not a good solution. So then what are you left with? Well then you’ve got negotiation. So I might say, well do we agree that we need to have dinner? Well, you know, you might think, okay, well we could agree on that. How often should we have it at home? Well that’s going to require a fair bit of thought. You want to go out now and then, how often? How much is that going to cost? What are we going to spend? Where are we going to go? Who pays? So that’s going to be like a whole conversation. So let’s say we figure that out, it’s like five days a week we’re going to stay home. Okay, who’s going to cook? Well, do you like cooking? Do I like cooking? That’s something to sort out. So that would be, that’s like a little discussion with your own physiology in some sense. You know, what’s your felt state while you’re preparing food? And maybe you’ll say, well, I like it. I’ll cook if there’s someone in the kitchen with me and, you know, someone else cleans up afterwards. Then it turns out that I don’t mind cooking. Well, then you might say, well, is not minding good enough or do you really want to enjoy it? It’s like, what’s the preconditions? What preconditions would have to be met for you to enjoy it? Well, you want to think about that because if you can get the person, either of you, who the hell cares, to enjoy it, then it’s sort of self-sustaining, right? You put that into place and then the thing runs smoothly across multiple iterations. So then you might think, well, what are the preconditions for us to do that in a way that would be joyful, let’s say. Okay, well, that’s a high bar. Well, one or the other of us should learn to cook because otherwise we’re going to be eating canned spaghetti or some other sort of horror. And that’s not very high quality, so that problem might have to be solved. And then there’s the problem of how you react to the person when they cook. You know, like, do you just assume that that’s their bloody responsibility and if they don’t live up to it there’s something wrong with them? Or do you notice what they’re doing and express some appreciation and gratitude in a way that would increase the probability that it would happen again? That would be a better solution, so then you have to negotiate about how you’re going to do that exactly, maybe even right down to the level of words. But you’re trying to serve a higher order by doing that, right? You’re trying to satisfy basic organismal needs, the provision of food. But I mean, food’s complicated for human beings because we just don’t pour dog food in the bowl and chow down. Even dogs won’t do that. Our dog won’t eat unless we’re eating. So human beings are extremely social eaters, so you have to get that right. But the conversation will only take place in the proper manner. If your orientation is proper during the conversation, and the orientation needs to be, how can we make this better for both of us in the long run and for the people around us? And you have to bow down before that in some sense as the highest order principle that you’re serving. And then you can stumble around trying to work that out. And then you might say, well, you cook three times a week and I cook twice and I’ll take you out once. And then of course you have to get the whole grocery thing settled out, and that’s a whole other bloody complicated conversation, but it needs to be done. And then you might say, well, let’s run this for a couple of weeks and we’ll see how it goes. And then we can meet again and we can discuss what worked and what didn’t. And the goal is to make it better, make it better, make it better, make it better. And then no one’s trying to win. Well, it depends on what you mean by win. I’m not trying to defeat you. Why? Well, I have to live with you. That would be the first reason. It’s like, what the hell good is it defeating me unless I want someone wandering around like this, resentful and bitter? Maybe I do want that. But I don’t think that’s a very good place to start. So when you have a client come in to see you, the rule is, now you’re telling the rules I use because they’re Rogerian. I will tell the person what I think. So I won’t tell them that what I think is right. But if they’re doing something and I have a reaction to that of some sort, that’ll usually express itself in a fantasy or thought and I’ll just tell them what happened. And you know, I try to do it as gently as I possibly can because you can use the truth as a club, but then that’s not the truth. And then at least they get the honest response of one person to what they’re like. And I’ll tell you, I’ve seen lots of people who’ve never got the honest response of any one person ever in their whole life to what they’re like. And so they have no idea what they’re like or what’s annoying other people or how they should behave or any of those things. So even though I’m not going to be right in that my reactions won’t be a precisely accurate representation of the average response of other people, which is basically what you’re trying to model, it’s going to be a lot better than they’ve had so far. And then the other precondition is you’re going to try really hard to get yourself together, whatever that means, we’re going to talk about whatever that means, and I’m going to support you in that. And that’s our goal. And that’s a variant of Rogerian unconditional positive regard. And his unconditional positive regard in some sense was the setup for the therapy. So the presupposition is you’re valuable, although maybe you’re a little on the bent and twisted side, but maybe you could be straightened up into something that’s deadly. And we’re going to start with that presupposition and we’re going to learn on the way. But that’s what we’re aimed at. So the unconditional positive regard, it’s like a human rights thing, because the basis of the idea of human rights is that people are valuable. They have some intrinsic value. I think maybe it’s reasonable to presuppose that from the Rogerian perspective is that what’s valuable about you is your being. You’re a locus of experience. And as such, you’re a unique locus of experience, and as such you have something to contribute that no one else can contribute. And that’s valuable. It’s intrinsically valuable. That’s the basic presupposition of the idea of human rights, by the way. So that’s acted out in the therapeutic session, but it’s acted out in any relationship that’s therapeutic. Here’s a counter example. Let’s say you’re trying to smoke, trying to quit smoking. You’re trying to quit smoking, okay, and your friends smoke, okay, so what do they do? Like, do they offer you a cigarette at every possible opportunity? Because that’s very common. People do that very commonly. Why? Well, maybe they’re mad that they can’t quit smoking, or maybe if you quit and they didn’t, that would cast them in a bad shadow, or maybe they’re just being malevolent, or maybe it’s a game, or whatever. But one of the things it isn’t is in the best interest of the person who’s trying to quit smoking, or drinking, or eating, or behaving in any sort of dismal manner that’s self-defeating across time. And so one of the things that, you know, I had a client just a while back and he was talking about an older sibling, and he used to make these models, very complicated models. He was quite young at this time. His sibling was like a decade and a half older, so he was like 10 or something like that. He’d make these really complex models. He’d spend a couple of weeks building them, and then when the older sibling came in, he just smashed them up. It’s like, well, let’s see what kind of stress this thing can take. It’s like, okay, what’s going on there? Well I wouldn’t say it’s unconditional positive regard with the aim of encouraging the person and bringing them to fruition. It’s quite the opposite. And it’s an instrumental use of action. It’s then the point is not to elevate me or you or both of us. The point is, I’m going to be the monster at the top of the hierarchy, and if you’re all crunched up and lying at the bottom, that’s just fine. And that’s a very common set of motivations. And you might ask, well, why isn’t that okay? Well, that’s a good question. I think the right answer to that is, as a long run game, it’s counterproductive. No one benefits. So there’s local benefits to you in the short term. So alright. Let me read you some things that Rogers wrote. Okay, this is a good one. This is his statements. Here’s some of his axiomatic presuppositions. So this is what you need to cleave to if you’re going to engage in the process of Rogerian therapy. You have to want to be independent. Now that’s interesting. I don’t know, maybe we can actually have a discussion about this. You know, Freud thought the Oedipal complex was universal. And what he meant by that, people usually don’t have this discussion, but we can give it a shot and see how it goes. What he meant by that was that the, that struggling out of the family, the primary family, is very, very difficult. So I can give you an example. So I had another client, very bright guy, second generation guy from the Middle East. And he was heading for a pretty good career. He’s a smart guy. He’s done a lot of work to get this career going. He was in a position that was difficult to obtain. He had to move to a different city in order to pursue this career. And his parents were very upset that he was moving off the street they lived in. Okay, so, from the Western perspective, roughly speaking, this is where it gets tricky. The proper thing to do on behalf of the parents would have been to support him in his attempts to establish himself independently. But the parents’ perspective was, you’re betraying the family by moving away. Now the question is, you know, is it reasonable to presume that independence is an absolute value? I mean, we’re having wars about this, that’s for sure. Wars have been going on for a long time. For Rogers, if you didn’t value independence, you couldn’t get going in this form of therapy. Freud thought that all cultures were eatable to one degree or another, and Jung thought that wasn’t true for Northern Europeans. And that was part of the reason why Jung and Freud came to a crossroads. So think about that. But in any case, for Rogers, only independence value individuals were suited for client-centred therapy. Here’s more, actually, yes? My pen that’s, I think, is you can’t be truly honest, or you will, even if you’re not. That’s another definition of independence in the sense that in term point view. Good point. I don’t know if you can be completely consistent with yourself and your family. Well that’s a very useful way of phrasing your question. That’s a very useful way of phrasing the issue. Can you be, if you’re honest, does that mean you’re independent? That’s a good question. Might mean that. Because it means that you’re, at least say, again, let’s take it from the Rogerian perspective, if you’re speaking for yourself, now that would be yourself in relationship to other people, the integrated self, right, not the kind of instrumental useless self that’s wandering around causing trouble. There’s still your unique position that has to be contended with, right, and the fact that you’re your own kind of bounded entity with its own destiny and path and its own particular biological structure. And it’s possible that the way that you define independence is that that particularity is properly integrated into the collective. So that’s a good issue. Okay, assuming a minimal natural, 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 behaviour 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. Pretty good hypothesis. So basically what he’s saying is that if we’re communicating and I tell you what’s actually going on with me the best I possibly can and try to get rid of all the motives that have nothing to do with communication, then that’s going to work out quite nicely in the long run. It’s going to work out for both of us and for the relationship. It’s like, it’s good. It’s an interesting hypothesis. I can tell you that people who don’t do this, you know, I showed you that Gottman, I don’t know how many of you looked at that link, the Gottman studies on marital satisfaction, right, but I thought that was really interesting because I’ve seen people like that lots of times. You know, they’re on the surface, everything’s fine, but while sometimes the tension is so high you can hardly even stand to be in the room with the people, you know, because you at an embodied level you’re mirroring the distress. You know, you get a pit in your stomach, it’s hard to breathe, and you just know. It’s probably smell I think is what it’s communicated by. You know, smell affects us in all sorts of ways we don’t understand. So here’s an example. Women like the smell of t-shirts that men wore if the men are symmetrical better than if the men aren’t symmetrical. So that’s a good example of how smell affects you. It affects you in lots of ways. So anyways, what Gottman observed was that basically the couples that weren’t getting along were just lying to each other all the time, right, because they were pretending that everything was alright when in fact nothing was alright at all. Their bodies were going haywire. That’s a technical term, haywire. So it was way too stressful for them, and you might say, well why is that bad? Why shouldn’t you be like that? Because that’s a good question. One is, if your stress responses are too elevated, we know what happens. That’s the generalized stress response. Your cortisol levels go up, and then you age fast. So if you want to age fast, that’s a very good way of doing it. But if that’s not your goal, you know, your goal is peace and harmony, then pretending that everything’s alright without communicating isn’t going to work. And so the couples aren’t saying things like, there’s something about the way we’re talking that’s making me extremely nervous. And then actually trying to figure that out. It’s like I wouldn’t say, well you’re making me nervous, because well maybe you are, but maybe not. Maybe I’m just the nervous type. God only knows. Let’s see if we can sort this out. Or maybe I’m nervous about something else completely. You know, maybe I’m nervous about women. So there’s lots of digging to do. Okay, so you can think about that. You can think, well is that a reasonable proposition? Yeah. You can try this. This is an excellent, this is, I’m not going to tell you many specific psychological exercises, but this is a really good one. It’s hard too. Real communication occurs and the evaluative tendency avoided when we listen with understanding. So the evaluative, Roger’s theory is difficult to understand with regards to the relationship between evaluation and unconditional positive regard. Because he tends to speak as if evaluation is bad. But really what he means is hierarchical evaluation, which is you’re worse than me, or I’m better than you. It’s like, those things might even be true in any given case, but they’re not relevant to what we’re doing. We’re trying to do something other than that. So when that creeps in, I think of that as dominance hierarchy maneuvering. That happens all the time when people are talking. They’re just maneuvering around in a dominance hierarchy. They’re not trying to communicate. So that’s the evaluative tendency. What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person’s point of view, to sense how it feels to him, to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about. Stated so briefly, this may sound absurdly simple, but it is not. It’s an approach which we have found extremely potent in the field of psychotherapy. It’s the most effective agent we know for altering the basic personality structure of an individual, and improving his relationships and his communications with others. That’s quite the statement, you know. The most effective agent we know for altering the basic personality structure of an individual. If I can listen to what he tells me, if I can understand how it seems to him, if I can see its personal meaning for him, if I can sense the emotional flavour which it has for him, then I will be releasing potent forces of change in him. If I can really understand how he hates his father or the university or communists, if I can catch the flavour of his fear of insanity or his fear of atom bombs or of Russia, it will be of the greatest help to him in altering those very hatreds and fears, and in establishing realistic and harmonious relationships with the very people and situations towards which he has felt hatred and fear. We know from our research, by the way, Rogers was one of the first clinicians who empirically evaluated the outcome of psychotherapy. And so he actually more or less established the idea that therapy outcomes should be measured scientifically. And in doing that, in some sense, he set down one element of the standards by which modern clinical psychologists are actually trained and practiced, because the modern clinical psychologist is a scientist practitioner. So the idea is that you should be trained as a researcher and as a practitioner, and that’s quite unique. Medical doctors, for example, are not trained that way, although you could make a very strong case that they should be. We know from our research that such empathic understanding, understanding with a person, not about him, is such an effective approach that it can bring about major changes in personality. Now, some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people and that you’ve never seen such results. The chances are very great indeed that your listening has not been of the type I have described. Unfortunately, I can suggest a little laboratory experiment which you can try to test the quality of your understanding. The next time you get into an argument with your wife or your friend or with a small group of friends, stop the discussion for a moment and for an experiment, institute this rule. Each person can only speak up for himself once he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately and to that speaker’s satisfaction. Now that’s the annoying part, right? Because if you’re in an argument, you’re going to use all sorts of rhetorical devices in order to win. And one of the most obvious of those rhetorical devices is that you make your case, and I only half listen because I’m formulating what I’m going to say to you next, and then I pose a bias in my processing of your argument and so that what I address when I talk to you is the sort of argument that you’d make if you were weak and stupid and contemptible. And then I go after that, and that’s basically a straw man approach, right? I take your position and I try to make it into the scrawniest little, radiest thing I can possibly manage, illustrating that it needs to be rubbed out and then I rub it out. It’s like the Rogerian approach is actually exactly the opposite. By the way, it’s the approach that Dostoevsky took to his characters when he wrote his great novels and it’s also the approach that all great novelists take to their character. Because if you’re a great novelist, you put yourself inside the head of the murderer, right? And Dostoevsky was great at that. So in Crime and Punishment, for example, the main character Raskolnikov is a law student and he’s all obsessed because he’s lost his faith in God and he’s got all these weird ideas that emerged in Europe at the end of the 1800s that if there’s no God, everything is permitted. And so he’s thinking, well am I moral just because I’m a coward, which was a Nietzschean proposition. Actually, Nietzsche said, most morality is cowardice. He didn’t say that morality was cowardice. He said most of the time when people are being cowardly, they pretend that’s moral, which is absolutely right. Anyways, he’s wrestling with this idea that morality is just cowardice and that once fundamental beliefs have disappeared, you can do anything you want and the only thing that’s there to stop you is your own fear. So that’s rattling around the back of his head. Now at the same time, he’s more or less starving to death and his sister is going to essentially prostitute herself to raise enough money so that he can stay in law school. Now it’s not exactly that. She’s going to go off and marry this guy that she doesn’t love who’s quite rich and she’s going to do that to keep him in law school. So that sort of sucks. You know, he’s not very happy about that. And then he’s living in this horrible flop house and the woman who runs it is – Dostoevsky sets this up quite nicely. She’s the sort of person that if she was run over by a horse cart, everyone would be pleased. She’s grasping and miserly and horrible and mean and malevolent and cruel and all those things. And then to make it even worse, she has this niece who isn’t very bright that she basically treats as a slave and tortures and orders around all the time. And then she has all these people who are living in her building which she doesn’t take care of and she’s just grasping money out of them all the time. And she doesn’t do anything with money, she just puts it in her little chest. And she lives on breadcrumbs and dust. So Dostoevsky’s very careful to set this situation up. It’s like, okay, is there such a thing as right or wrong? Well, Ryskolnikov, he’s pretty puzzled about that. Plus he’s hungry and he’s drinking too much and he doesn’t eat properly. Well, that’s why he’s hungry. So his head is a little on the adult side. And then he’s got this terrible moral conundrum. It’s like there’s this horrible woman and she’s torturing her niece and then his sister’s going to go into a loveless marriage and he can’t stay in law school. And so he rationalizes and says, oh, here’s the solution, man. I’ll just get rid of that old woman. No one’s going to miss her, man. I’ll be doing the world a favour by getting rid of her. And then I’ll take her money and then my sister doesn’t have to become a prostitute, roughly speaking. I get to go to law school and I’m going to be a good guy. And so, poof, perfect. And if there’s no ultimate right and wrong, then I’m set. It’s an instrumental argument, right? Well so, he kills her. Well, and you have to read the book if you want to rest the story. Suffice it to say that things do not go exactly as he predicted. So the first thing he figures out is that the person you are before you hit someone with an axe and the person you are immediately after you hit someone with an axe are not the same persons. So he assumes constancy of identity across every experience. That turns out to be seriously wrong. And Dostoevsky, man, he does such a terrifying book. It’s the most psychologically accurate book I ever read, I think. But the reason I’m telling you about it is this is what made Dostoevsky so courageous. It’s like he generated up a murderer who was basically him as a young man. And he gave this kid every reason to murder. And everyone he could think up, he tried to make the case for murder as strong as he could possibly make it. So he wasn’t generating up some two-dimensional bad guy. And then he has the argument. So that’s so brilliant, hey, because if I really want to have a discussion with you and I want to get somewhere, wherever somewhere might be, I want to help you make your argument as strong as you can on the off chance that you have something to say that I don’t know. And maybe you’ll do the same to me. And then we can have the discussion and we can get the thing solved and then maybe it won’t be around to plague us anymore. Well people don’t do that in relationships, you know. What they do is maintain fragile peace. I actually think that probably works if you’re bounded by rules. And this was a Jungian observation. So Jung believed that you didn’t have to have an individual relationship if you were in a traditional culture. Because women did women things and men did men things and they walked along the path in parallel. And there were no conflicts because there were no, well there were, but most of what you were supposed to do was laid out for you. And modern people don’t like that idea but just try negotiating over who should cook dinner. See if you can settle that before you make a decision about whether rules are useful or not. Because I’ve been in lots of houses where that fight had been going on for 35 years. Never solved. So kids couldn’t eat, the food was terrible, the husband and the wife were at each other’s throats. Fun! So it’s really hard once you’re out of the rules. Once you’re out of the rules you have to do it as an individual. But that’s a tremendous demand. It’s an unbelievable demand. It’s the same demand that essentially that Dostoevsky put on himself. It’s like we’re partners. We’ll say you are one weird and unwieldy and malevolent and peculiar creature. And so am I. So like how the hell are we going to sort that out? Well, you better be awake if you’re going to sort that out. And the alternative is the Gottman situation, right? Everything’s fine and your heart’s racing and your cortisol is generating and you’re having murderous dreams. I’ve had clients who were very motivated to commit homicide. And they had their reasons. And one client I’m thinking about, she thought it was her moral duty to do this because the person that she hated had really hurt their family. Like not in some trivial way, but like hurt them as badly as she possibly could. But there was nothing she could do about it. There was no legal recourse. And so she was a very moral person. In fact, somewhat, I would say, doesn’t matter. She’s a very moral person. This was just driving her crazy. It’s like I have to act. I have to act. I can’t just let this person get away with it. Because it was also ongoing. Well, what are you going to say? Well, stop thinking about that. You could put your thoughts to a more productive use. It’s not helpful. You can’t help a person like that at all until you put yourself in their situation. You think, okay, if I was in that situation and that had happened, what would I do? And then the first thing I thought was, oh, I’d be having the same kind of murderous fantasies. So that doesn’t seem like… it’s possible that that’s not a great solution. So let’s see if we can come up with something else. But the danger there is that you have to put yourself in that situation. And people don’t like to do that because they think, well, I never have murderous fantasies. It’s like, if you would never have murderous fantasies, I would actually say there’s something wrong with you. If you’re not capable of that, then there’s like half of you missing. It’s in there, man. And when someone’s pushing on you at some point in your life, and they will, you better have that reserve capacity or they’re just going to mow you right over. So you can see what this would mean. It would simply mean that before presenting your own point of view, it would be necessary for you to really achieve the other speaker’s frame of reference, to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But if you try it, you will discover it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. However, once you have been able to see the other’s point of view, your own comments will have to be drastically revised. You will also find the emotion going out of the discussion, the differences being reduced, and those differences which remain being of a rational and understandable sort. So Rogers thought that courage was a prerequisite for empathic understanding. It’s interesting too because, you know, here’s a question for you. It’s like, should you trust people? Or more specifically, should I trust you? Well, you might think, if you’ve heard me talk, you’d think, well, there’s no way you should trust a person because they’re just so full of snakes and malevolence that it’s just absolutely mind-boggling. So why in the world would you ever trust something like that? Well, then you can think about it this way. There’s two kinds of trust. There’s the kind of trust you have when you’re too stupid to know better, and that’s not trust, that’s naivete, and that is not a moral virtue. And there’s the kind of trust you have when you know that the person you’re talking to, and you are completely full of snakes, and you decide as an act of courage that you’re going to trust the person anyways because that, of all the things you could do to help lead them and the discussion towards the light, that’s the most important. It’s like, I’m going to assume that in our interactions, your impulse towards the good is going to be victorious. Now is it? If you’re interested in this, you could go online, you could watch Paul Bernardo. You remember old Paul Bernardo? Okay, there’s videos of Paul Bernardo online when he’s talking to a bunch of RCMP officers and judges. They’re trying to extract some more information from him about some murders that remained unsolved. You want to see a psychopath in operation, you can just watch those videos. It’s amazing. He runs the meeting like he’s the CEO of Apple. It’s amazing. And that’s a problem, I would say, to some degree, for the Rogerian approach, right? Because what about Paul Bernardo? Is everyone fundamentally oriented towards the good? Well, it’s a reasonable presupposition most of the time, I think. It works better if societies organize themselves according to that principle, because otherwise we know, for example, that one of the, you might think, what’s a natural resource? Oil, right? Or bauxite or iron ore, or forget about all that. The fundamental natural resource is trust. So if you look around the world and you look at economies like Japan, for example, Japan has no natural resources, right? Well they’re filthy rich. Because the economy is basically predicated on interpersonal trust. So when there’s been some lovely work done in economics regarding precisely that, without trust, your oil just sits in the ground or leaks out of the pipelines because nobody welded them properly. There’s no reason to assume that you’re going to be able to do anything cooperative or collaborative. So trust is a necessity. If you’re really willing to understand a person in this way, if you’re willing to world and see the way life appears to him, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it his way. You might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or personality. The risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face. If I enter as fully as I am able into the private world of the neurotic or psychotic individual, isn’t there a risk that I might become lost in that world? Most of us are afraid to take that risk. The great majority of us cannot listen. We find ourselves compelled to evaluate because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it. So it says three o’clock on this. Is that right? Well, that’s a good place to stop then.