https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3uJkd54p9dY
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 are very thoughtful, there’s intellectual continuity of ideas stretching over exceptional spans of time. And so it’s exactly the sort of thing that you would, 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 phenomenologies, 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’d 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 all 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 the 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 he was very much, 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 objective, 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 that 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 1800s, 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 20th century. So it’s interesting, because you 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 of examples of why it might bear some questioning, and you can think about it. The first problem 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. So knowing the wavelength of light doesn’t seem to tell you much about the subjective experience of colour. We experience colour, for example, in a non-continuous fashion, right, because we see discreet colours like you’d see in a rainbow. 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’s clear demarcations of colour. Well that’s because of the way your brain is wired. 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 colours that we see, has substantial practical utility. Now one of the things you might ask is, well do those colours exist? Well objectively, they don’t seem to exist as colours, partly because the wavelengths that we see are actually continuous. So when one colour 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 colours we see real or not? Well that’s a good question. You can’t get a collective experience of pain, like 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 yourself 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 break-up, bifurcation of the world. We have no explanation whatsoever for consciousness. That seems like a big problem, right, because you can make a case that there’s no being without consciousness. 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. Like we have a certain perception of time, we have a certain temporal realm within which we exist. Our refresh rate for our vision, for example, is about 60 hertz, which is why you can see computer screens flicker if they have a refresh rate that’s slower than that. So 60 hertz to us looks continuous, but you know, there’s 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 picture, a still picture that was there forever and then another still picture that was there forever and like 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 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 infection, and so a virulent infection is one that’s very severe but also very transmissible because those things are separate, and then also one that could survive being aerosolized because it turns out that that’s quite difficult, which we should all be very thankful about. And one of the projects 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 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 could also imagine even that if you 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 about that. And it’s maybe that sense of wrongness as well that can’t be captured with inside 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 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 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 that you should approach reality is by assuming that all of 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 a dream and the experience you have 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 Descartes, say, and by, well, 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. Well, had the Russians been, 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 Roger’s 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 have 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, kids are quite sophisticated in their ability to categorize. 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, 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 and looked down the street and there were a couple of garbage cans knocked over and the kid said, oh 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 interesting, 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 nest and so do bees and, you know, they keep their hives clean and all of that. So it could be a very primordial instinct. Anyway, she came in with this dream and she was quite upset. Then you think, well, there’s 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 mirror, like a fantasy, but with the definition of fantasy being some fundamentally useless act of, what, 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 your 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 the garbage bag and that there was a garbage can nearby and 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, that’s 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 to, 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 the 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’s the basic outlines of his view of the world. So first of all, you exist within a phenomenological field. Now phenomenon comes from the Greek word phainis tha, and phainis tha 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’s 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 might be some commonalities across people because otherwise you wouldn’t even be able to talk about a book. Well regardless, when you’re interacting with something, some things announce themselves on your field of consciousness and other 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 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’d 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 that if you just kept doing that all the time for the rest of your life in small and 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 multifaceted 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 a 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 it 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 somewhat terminologically confusing. Roger’s self is more like Freud’s ego. But Rogers would define the self as those 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. They’d say, well, the body needed to be cut. And what Rogers would say about that was that a 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 have. The other concept he had was the concept of the organism. Now you can think of the self as what you identify with I, and then you can think of the organism as all those things that are unique to you that you might identify with the I. Now it’s tricky, eh, because imagine that you get angry during a fight with someone. And they say, you’re angry, and you say, no I’m not. Well, 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 emotion to be incorporated with those things that you identify with. And the researchers 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 between that concept and, say, Freud’s idea of the ego and the id. You know, because the id was this sort of external thing that was the 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. And so there is these sets of phenomena that all of the different clinicians are talking about, but all of them are talking about it starting from different initial presuppositions. And it’s like a group of people in a room shining a flashlight on a very complex object. They’re all standing in a slightly different position. The complex object is the same thing, but you can only see parts of it. And so you need multiple different ways of looking at things so that 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 world, the entire domain of your being, you can’t accurately represent even the organismic, the aspect of that field that’s related to the organismic you. There’s this 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. There’s this problem that consciousness researchers always refer to. It’s an 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 predeterministic 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’s 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 you neither expect nor want. And you could say, well, perhaps that’s a reasonable definition of adaptation. Now, this isn’t biological or evolutionary adaptation, right? This is personal adaptation. They’re similar in some ways, but importantly different. I mean, you can be adapted to an environment without that in any way having any effect whatsoever on your evolutionary adaptiveness. Now if you’re, 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 defences to notice the discrepancy between your organism and the broader environment. That’s pathological. And the way that’s going to be marked is first by anxiety. You know, maybe you tell a joke, there’s some people sitting around you, you tell a joke and you see people kind of making that face and maybe rolling their eyes. It’s like, well that’s not exactly, you might think, well they’re joking, they’re just teasing me. Well maybe they’re not, maybe they’re damn sick of your stupid stories and you’ve told them 50 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 symbolically, 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 a 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’re interacting 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, that, and I’m not asking what are the objective markers of being anxious because we actually don’t know those. We know 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 felt 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 feeling, the idea that the feeling is an element of experience is something that we just take for granted. I got angry today. Everybody nods. Or maybe I tell a little story and say, well, you know, I got on the 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 every day and the driver knows me. And I got angry and everybody will nod. And the reason they nod is, well, partly because they can imagine that that’s how they would have 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 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 of your adaptation or lack thereof to 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 behaviour therapists 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 behaviour 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 you’re 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 different ways of symbolizing it come to mind. These people are all just jerks. And then another thing comes to mind is, well, maybe nobody likes me. And then maybe another idea that’s associated with symbolization comes to mind, which is, well, maybe there’s elements of my social behaviour 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 actions in the world as an organism. And so that’s partly why Rogers believed that the organism had wisdom. 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. You start with Rogers’ initial assumptions, which is 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. 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. So I could say, if I was being cynical, although I don’t really think it’s a cynical response, if I was willing to sound cynical, that the only reason that psychiatrists diagnose their clients is so that insurance companies can 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 unique, a solution that’s unique in many ways, and one that’s also personal. Rogers also wasn’t a particularly great fan of the psychoanalyst’s tendency to look for the causes of present behaviour in past events. So he didn’t regard fishing in the past as a useful, necessarily useful expedition, or as a necessary expedition. So 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 flavour. You could also call it non-directive therapy. Now if you’re a behaviour therapist, you might actively strategise with your client about what they’re going to do in the next week. And then once they’ve established 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 behind, would sit so the client would be laying on a couch and Freud would sit 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-realisation of their own memories. If things happen to you in your past and they still cause you emotion, let’s say they’re more than 18 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 so Rogers was like that. He wanted you to make your own decisions. So he believed that the therapeutic endeavour required 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 much clearly as you can because if you don’t, there isn’t… I don’t know what’s going on with you and there’s not a possibility, not any possibility at all that I can… that this process will be useful if we’re talking about things that don’t exist. So one precondition 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 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 appear. 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 you experience the external world. You’re not voluntarily creating them. 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 because 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’s 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 might 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 organism, 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 have 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 was 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 50 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 behaviour on the part of one individual, the more the ensuing relationship will involve a tendency towards 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 communication. 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 50 years ago was marriage, but I don’t… 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 the Rogerian answer to that would be the more based on trust the relationship is, more likely that you’re going to be in contact and to 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 movement towards self-awareness and self-actualization. It’s a two brains are better than one idea. So we say, well we establish a relationship, and the goal of our relationship is to make things better. And we make a presupposition that the way you make things better is by telling the truth as you see it. So remember this is a phenomenological theory, and so the truth that Roger is talking about isn’t objective truth, and I suspect 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. What did you mean when you said that? Well, God, you know, you can argue about that to the point of divorce and for ten years afterwards without ever coming to a satisfactory conclusion. All right. 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 towards reciprocal communication with the same qualities. Okay, so here’s the idea. You go see a psychotherapist or a geriatric psychotherapist, and 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 the 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 subsieve perhaps or perceive all the nonverbal 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, wait a sec, I’m trying to understand what you’re telling me, and I notice that you just said this, and it seems to imply this, but then 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 because 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 I’ll have a little image, like sort of a 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 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’s sensations that emerge in your midsection, and there’s thoughts of emergency. And, 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 just sort of watched her have the seizure, and I thought, oh, it’s not real. It’s not real seizure. She was very good at it. And 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 that you… 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 consequence of a very complex, complex in Jungian terms. There is a secondary motivation in Freudian terms. You go through with the whole routine, then you end up at a psych hospital, and you see four experts and they tell you of paranoid schizophrenia. Do you really think you’re going to not believe that? Or at least 10% of you is going to believe it. You’re going to wonder after that. And if another 20 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 your organismic valuing systems aren’t working carefully in tandem. Anyway, so someone might be telling me a story that’s, you know, like a story 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, but that’s a pretty terrible story, but I’m having no emotional response to it at all. Do you have any reason, do you have any idea why that might be? Well, then maybe we’ll, 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 who’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, it’s not true, you’re not doing them any good at all. You’re just 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. So which means I can actually feel emotions. It’ll make me tear up, but it’s just something they just barely, they barely allude to, you know. I got a client a while back who 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, 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 the 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 a 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. That’s exactly the sort of 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. If you want someone to do something that you like, you should tell them when they do things that you like so that they know 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 and 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. That’s stupid, by the way. So like if you want to 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… What? 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 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 18 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 it. And if you do that and another 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, Roger’s idea is that if you communicate properly with the person that with, that you can model proper being in some sense and that at least you can attempt to model it 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 doing, 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 Roger 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 when 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’d been telling me that they’d been doing that was right on the right track. And then you can say, look, I noticed that when you talked about this, you know, your face relaxed, you didn’t look as anxious, you were smiling, you know, and it was a genuine smile and for like a second or two there you 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 someone 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, is that you have your weaknesses and inadequacies and you can’t think them, think yourself out of them by yourself, partly because they colour 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 upward spiral and in some sense that’s the core theory of Rogerian psychotherapy. It’s like, genuine honest communication can heal people and genuinely dishonest communication can make them pathological. 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. And you’ll notice 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 with the broader world and then they’re going to suffer and then that will cascade and then all sorts of things will start to happen. 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 1950s 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. Thank you.