Developing
News January – March 2000
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Has
Postmodernism Influenced Your Practice? Do You Think About Human
Development?
-
Lois Holzman
This
issue of Developing News is devoted to two topics that
figure prominently in the ongoing dialogue on the changing future
of psychology. At the beginning of the year, we contacted some
colleagues and invited them to tell us how these topics figure
in their work and, more broadly, the fields of psychology, psychotherapy
and/or education. Specially, we asked them to address either or
both of the following questions:
Has
postmodernism influenced your practice? Do you think it is influencing
psychology's role in the broader culture?
The
concept of development is out of favor with critical psychologists
and postmodernists alike (seen as a thoroughly modernist concept,
ideologically and philosophically). How do you think about human
development in relation to your own work, to psychotherapy/education/psychology?
We
are pleased to present essays by four colleagues: Joan Ingalls
from New Hampshire; Gerda Klammer from Vienna, Austria; John Morss
from Dunedin, New Zealand; and Maryhelen Snyder from Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
Individually,
each brings a creative openness to the search for ways to relate
to people as social beings. Taken together, they provide a glimpse
of the multitude of traditions that are being used to create new
directions for understanding human life and creating a humane
social practice.
Look for more comments in the next issue of Developing News
- and if you'd like to share your views, email me at lholzman
@eastsideinstitute.org.
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The
Influence of Social Therapy in Sport "Mental Training"
-
Joan S. Ingalls
I
am a sport mental training consultant. I see individual athletes
and performing artists in my private practice. Sometimes I work
with athletes at their sport-training sites. Usually I see an
athlete for just one two-hour session if it is an individual session,
but there are exceptions. If the work is in an institutional setting
where my employer simply does not believe that one session is
enough, I schedule more. There is always something further to
explore beyond the initial "problem." If I see a group of athletes,
I may have several meetings with them. The presenting problem
is usually performance anxiety - the athletes get nervous before
their performance, and can not perform as well as they could if
they were in their "optimal state" for performance.
Sport
mental training is the practice of teaching athletes mental skills
such as attentional control, thought stopping, relaxation, and
affirmations. To use Fred Newman's term, this practice runs the
risk of "commodifying" human emotional responses: emotions in
the world of sport are made distinct as things that have value
as the means to a superb performance, a successful career and
a high paying job. Moreover, by demanding specific emotions in
specific situations, those engaged in this enterprise ignore the
complexity of the human being and the environment which limits
the ability of humans to know in any given moment what is the
best course to secure their overall well-being.
In the search of a more humanistic approach that utilized systems
theory in working with athletes, in 1980 I began to use the reframing
technique of Neurolinguistic Programming. When applied to performance
anxiety, this technique focuses on finding new behaviors to address
the positive intention of the part of the personality that is
supposedly responsible for the anxiety. Briefly, the reframing
looks like this.
Performance anxiety takes the form of a "physical symptom" as
well as "mental" confusion. The athlete feels such symptoms as
a churning stomach, pounding heart, shortness of breath or dizziness.
I ask the athlete to communicate with the part of his or her personality
that is responsible for these symptoms. I ask him or her to assume
that this part is creating the symptoms in order to accomplish
a positive intention. I ask him or her to thank this part for
its positive intention, and ask it to be willing to find new ways
(other than creating performance anxiety) to get its positive
intention addressed. Athletes are highly motivated individuals
with a large capacity for inner focus, and a strong awareness
of inner bodily states and images associated with them (Gendlin,
1970). They easily go though these steps of the reframe.
Recently, in the spirit of complexity theory, I began to describe
the result of reframing as the transformation of the self to a
complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS is a phrase used in complexity
theory to describe a system that is optimally adaptive and developing
in any environment, but too complex for its behavior to be predictable
in any given situation. Although it might not matter to some,
and makes no difference in my practice as far as I can tell, words
and their connotations are everything to others. CAS sounds mechanistic
to some. And, consequently, I coined the phrase "dynamically constructed
self" (DCS) to take its place. DCS captures the idea of optimal
adaptation (from complexity theory) but, in addition, the concept
of the self as co-constructed (from constructivist therapies).
I struggle with the concept of co-construction, wondering how
this perspective might influence my interactions with my client,
or how I might change what I do as I realize how the co-construction
of the self might manifest itself.
This
transformation of the self to a DCS or CAS (whichever you prefer)
is a process in which all the parts of the personality increase
"appreciative communication" among themselves. Experimental data
(Losada 1999) has suggested that the density of appreciative communication
is the essential characteristic of a CAS. The reframing process
is the vehicle for increasing the density of communication. Ultimately,
in reframing, all the parts of the personality are asked to show
appreciation for the positive intentions of all the other parts.
As a CAS, a personality consists of patterns of organization from
which optimally adaptive behaviors emerge.
When
a person comes into therapy, he or she is not a CAS. In terms
of complexity theory, he or she is a "point" or "cyclic attractor."
An example of a point is the client stuck doing the same thing
people who are miserable in the same job for many years telling
themselves that they have security. A cycle attractor refers to
a client vacillating between two poles, for example, a binge and
purge dieter. The focus of counseling is on perturbating these
patterns, not on gaining conscious control over them by an exertion
of will, not on achieving a specific outcome. In these ways, it
is the "end of knowing." One does not know what the outcome will
be or how it will come about. As such, "therapy" becomes a matter
of the transformation of the self to a CAS, rather than a matter
of a result-oriented mental training. Athletes seem to be relieved
that the transformational option is available; when offered the
choice between the two modes of treatment, they always prefer
it. Perhaps they recognize that they are escaping the commodification
of their feelings.
On
a final note, I will add some more recent and not fully formed
ideas. I am exploring the role of Vygotsky's concept of the zone
of proximal development (ZPD) in the process of reframing, or
in the behavior of a CAS. The ZPD has been described as a relationship
in which people support each other in whatever they are doing,
like we support a child who is learning to speak. We perform speaking
with the child/new speaker, and in this way, he or she does what
he or she can't do. How might the counselor and client create
a ZPD; what role might creating the ZPD play in transforming a
personality to a CAS and maintaining it as a CAS?
Grendlin,
E. (1978). Focusing. NY: Everest House. Losada, M. (1999).
The complex dynamics of high productivity teams. Accepted for
publication Mathematics and Computer Science. Available
E-mail:
mlosada@earthlink.com
Joan
Ingalls is in private practice in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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Postmodern
Therapy with Intimacy Issues
-
Maryhelen (Mel) Snyder
The
realization that the whole idea of a core inner being is a socio-linguistic
construct has strongly affected my personal and professional life.
My favorite writer/thinker in this regard is Jiddu Krishnamurti
who questions each and every assumption about "self" that, since
childhood, I have taken as obvious and true. In Total Freedom,
a comprehensive selection from Krishnamurti's talks and writings,
he focuses on exploring these assumptions experientially.
Historically, when formulations regarding human developmental
or intrapsychic process have been put forth, they have not been
seen as expressions of social constructions; i.e., as outgrowths
of cultural/dialogic practices over the generations. For example,
Freud broke free of the Judaic-Christian religious-moralistic
conceptualizations in which a "soul" imposed control on a "body,"
but such constructs as "superego," "ego," and "id" still hold
to the dualism and the intrapsychic conflict of the religious
formulation. Postmodern thinkers have been able to stand back
from both the religious and psychoanalytic formulations and see
them not as descriptions of objective phenomena intrinsic to human
nature, but as expressions/formulations of civilization's dialogic
civilizing processes, which are necessarily limited by the current
linguistic practices even when new terms are invented.
The
postmodern view is that each "new" formulation/perception is necessarily
bound by language and culture. It is useful for the therapist
and the client to learn to experience experience with the
knowledge that current linguistic/cultural practices are shaping
that experience.
As
a "postmodern" therapist, I listen for the bodily felt experience
and, with my client, tend to either deconstruct or bypass the
language attached to that experience. In a recent couples session,
for example, the wife described and revealed emotionally her intense
feelings of "rage" when her husband reached out to touch her.
The words she gave to her feelings were to the effect that he
had been emotionally and physically distant from her for so long
that she was angry at him and afraid to let him get close to her
for fear that it wouldn't last or wasn't sincere. I suggested
that she simply stay with the feelings in her body and set aside
the brain's habit of naming and explaining them. I invited her
to recall how an infant or young child often responds to a mother
when that child feels "left." We shared a picture of the way in
which the child might push against the mother, turn away, or scream
at her. At the same time, we agreed that the child did not want
the mother to leave again. On the contrary, the child seemed to
very much want the connection with the mother.
What I did not do in this session is frame my client's reaction
in terms of individual developmental issues. I used the example
of the child only because the infant reveals its approach/avoidance
responses without explaining them. I am aware that even in the
infant these responses may be shaped by cultural/linguistic phenomena,
but the responses may also be closer to revealing very basic human/animal
needs for reliable nurturance and connection.
As
a postmodern therapist, I invite the possibility that the nonjudgmental
awareness of our emotions and the ability to "stand back" from
the meanings we give those emotions (i.e., the ability to be conscious
of consciousness) frees us to "author" (perform, constitute, create)
our responses according to preferred ways of being. With these
particular clients, for example, we dialogued about the possibilities
of acting on behalf of the preference for closeness. For the husband,
this might mean choosing to touch or hold his wife in the face
of her emotions. For the wife, this might mean allowing and even
inviting closeness in spite of the possibility of "negative" emotions
arising reflexively in her body.
I engage in all this exploration dialogically and invite my clients
to join in the trial-and-error experiment of being human and,
thereby, apparently capable of applying intentionality to our
lives in spite of our pre-existing biology and conditioning.
Maryhelen (Mel) Snyder is in private practice in Albuquerque,
NM, Director of the New Mexico Relationship Enhancement Institute
and adjunct faculty at the UNM Medical School where she teaches
an annual seminar in social constructionist approaches to therapy.
Mel is also a poet and writer; her recent articles address poetry
as a metaphor for social constructionist therapy; mutual love
in psychotherapeutic process; the radical leap of empathy; and
the loss and recovery of erotic intimacy in primary (adult) relationships.
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Risk
Theory, the Postmodern and Politics
-
John Morss
Risk
Theory is a collection of ideas and approaches generated by social
theorists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens and currently being
explored by psychologists. The major starting point was Beck's
1992 book The Risk Society. Originally published in Germany
on the heels of Chernobyl, the book argued that major ecological
disasters make us re-think the nature of risk in our contemporary
world. Risk is no longer risk of small dangerous events, nor of
calculable (and, hence, insurable) events. Nuclear power plants
don't take out insurance. Just as modern warfare is total (and
it's been argued that this phenomenon started with the Napoleonic
wars in Europe) the dangers of our contemporary world - ecological,
biomedical, communicational - far outstrip our efforts to contain
them either conceptually or in public policy.
Beck's
own background was in the sociology of work and The Risk Society
discusses implications for, and parallels with, what is happening
in daily social life including "he family." In general his position
is that the contemporary social-political world is "reflexively
modern", that is, the modern world of capitalism, industrial production
and the bourgeois family has doubled back on itself, the side-effects
of the modern world racing away from any planned or rational agenda.
(There's more than a little Marxism in Beck's account.) Modernity's
self-image of taming the natural world and harnessing it to proper
human aspirations is revealed as myth, because the natural world
is no longer separable from human intervention.
Beck's work rang bells with Giddens, already the UK's leading
social theorist (and now director of the London School of Economics),
and the two have collaborated in the last decade in working on
implications for politics, social life, intimacy and the meaning
of life in general! Giddens had been an advisor to Tony Blair
(well, no one's perfect) and is working on re-examining democracy,
socialism, the nation-state and political form in the contemporary
world. Beck's recent work (for example, The Reinvention of
Politics) is very exciting. It includes discussions of mediation
and doubt as a process of investigation, and explicit statements
of a social-constructionist position. Giddens' work on politics
emphasizes that identity politics is well past its use-by date.
There
are a number of important issues for psychology to grapple with
in both the individual and the collaborative work of Beck and
Giddens. Much of what they are discussing overlaps significantly
with discussions of the "postmodern" although they tend to prefer
the idea of a plurality of fragmentations of modernity - not just
one thing "replacing" it - which (as sociologists) is what they
find the term postmodern being used to indicate. I have found
moving from one set of writings to the other and back again (postmodernism
and risk theory/reflexive modernization) to be invigorating and
stimulating. One idea that seems to me to come out of Beck is
that in the modern-industrial world, certain practices masquerade
as traditions and artificially sustain the capitalist economy.
The nuclear family and gendered occupation roles are examples.
It seems to me that "development" is as well - in the sense that
development is a series of age-graded expectations and requirements.
At present I'm happily working on these ideas in the Centre for
Cultural Risk Research at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst,
Australia. An introduction to contemporary risk theory has been
written (Routledge 1999) by Deborah Lupton of the Centre and provides
clear overviews of the field.
John
Morss was until recently Senior Lecturer in Education at the University
of Otago, New Zealand. He is co-editor with fellow developmental
psychologist Lois Holzman of the forthcoming Postmodern Psychologies,
Societal Practice and Political Life (Routledge, 2000).
Other books include The Biologising of Childhood: Developmental
Psychology and the Darwinian Myth (Erlbaum, 1990), Growing
Critical: Alternatives to Developmental Psychology (Routledge,
1996) and (co-editor with T. Linzey) Growing Up: The Politics
of Human Learning (Longmans NZ, 1991). John serves as co-chair
of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology.
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Has
Postmodernism Influenced My Practice?
-
Gerda Klammer
In
my opinion, the shift from modernism to postmodernism (this "Kuhnian
paradigm shift") was a gradual change in focus, rather than a
radically different approach in the field of psychology. (Perhaps
it was only a case of the half-full glass becoming half-empty.)
In the I970s at my university in Salzburg, we (students and staff)
never revered the pragmatic, scientific, machine model of psychology;
it was one among many approaches and hardly any students preferred
it. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis had always been important;
philosophers like Heidegger, Gadamer, Kant, Nietzsche and the
French great thinkers were always being discussed. For my Ph.D.
l had to pass philosophy courses in addition to psychology courses.
Statistical approaches were not the only acceptable scientific
means of producing "knowledge" - my dissertation involved a study
with only two subjects. Students in the 68 movement with Marxist
compassions created the Society of Critical Psychology (a small
group that still exists today, although many other leftist organizations
of my student years disappeared). For many of us, the psychotherapeutic
workshops we attended privately off campus and the discussions
we had with each other had just as great an impact on our training
in psychology as our university courses. I do not want to say
that "modern psychology" was so different in the German countries,
and that many did not act as if their approaches were the only
right ones. But there were parallel traditions to the mainstream,
some marginal, some hardly noticed, but clearly many students
were aware of the multiple approaches to capture the psychological.
In
family therapy, the main field I currently work in, a shift in
the academic discourse took place when people started to deconstruct
the normative concepts of structural approaches on the theoretical
level and accept the changes that were occurring in family arrangements
(the traditional father-mother-child family hardly ever came to
therapy!). The change to "systemic therapy" came in the 1980s,
indicating that we deal with people and their significant others,
whoever is involved (problem organizing and dissolving systems)
and that normative ideas of how people would function (better)
are less helpful than respecting people's indigenous ways of living,
their values, convictions, goals and ideas about dissolving problems.
We began to focus on dissolving problems with the clients by looking
at solution focused
aspects rather than modeling a treatment
plan for clients that we and they have to "administer." The therapist
has to use all his/her experience to listen to the client and
collaborate with him/her to find ways for dissolving the concerns.
How? By creative: models of solution focused approaches, narrative
styles, performative approaches, group settings, single sessions
- whatever clients find useful. The change, as experienced by
the client, is from having an ideal of how people should be in
order to lose their problem to having a guide. Lynn Hoffman¥s
book Foundations of Family Therapy (Basic Books, I981)
describes this shift.
I guess that comes close to what you might call a postmodern approach.
For me things became more congruent: I did not have to work as
if l had enough power to bring my ideas about the family to the
family. I could relax more and listen. Not that this is an easy
process; I constantly have to change, get rid of my prejudices,
fixed ideas and concepts (and l seem to have many). I even have
to give up the wish to induce change, as this seems to get in
the way of change happening. Jay Efran once said, "Change happens,
it is not producible." Harry Goolishian's words "the position
of not knowing" has shaken many of us up - to take this seriously
means to question the therapeutic practice in general - question
the assumption of dealing with problems and how to collaborate
with clients. This makes the whole endeavor interesting; there
is not a minute of boredom in being a conversational partner and
taking people seriously - what they want and what ideas they have
about their goals and doubts and wishes - and what l should contribute
to it all. I join in as well as I can and it is always a rehearsal
or a unique moment that cannot be repeated, as it creates a history
of its own.
Members of the East Side Institute inspired me with their ideas
of creating stages and emphasizing the performative, the many
possibilities and not letting it freeze too soon into "the" way
to do things and cut off all the other ways and possibilities
and connotations and meanings. We can focus on the being or the
doing or the performing and not take the performed as an essence
of oneself, but instead take it as a good try, perhaps, that created
an experience we can like or dislike or shape or let go. Why let
the "actual" dominate the multiple potentials? This opened other
doors of curiosity for me to possibilities of understanding and
interacting and being useful to people. Most important, it opened
the door that not only I or the clients inhabit multiple potentiality,
but also the situation, the interaction, the moment need not be
pinned down to the present (that leads inevitably to an unchangeable
past). I like the ideas of Vygotsky's "tool and result dialectics"
and "doing as if" and the seriousness of Wittgenstein's language
games.
I
do not know where this will lead me. All l know is l am learning
to let go more and more, and students who watch me and clients
who work with me find nothing special; only afterwards they realize
they learned or it helped to join with me for a while. Putting
myself in the story, in the relating, or "dialogical" as Ken Gergen
would say, l seem to be able to look around and see possibilities,
dominant and marginal, the unheard and also the sayable, easier
than following a concept or theory. And when I listen to Mary
and Ken Gergen, l realize how much l still could let go to be
more in the dialogical without getting lost, something I seem
to have feared for a long time. I do not know if all this has
anything to do with postmodernism. I only know that hanging around
the postmodern fans is relaxing, inspiring and fun.
Gerda
Klammer is a psychologist in Vienna where she works with the child
protective service and teaches systemic family psychotherapy and
mediation. Gerda is coeditor of the Austrian psychology journal
and a member of Psychotherapiebeirat, a psychotherapy advisory
board for the ministry.
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