Beyond Psychology: An Introduction to Metapsychology

Preface

This book lays the foundation for a way of helping another person to improve rapidly and profoundly the quality of life. This approach is unique in that it is both directive and non-judgmental. It provides guidance, yet allows people being helped to reach their own understandings and make their own judgments without receiving interpretations, approval, or disapproval. Since anyone can stand to improve the quality of life in some way, anyone can benefit from the techniques discussed in this book. Nevertheless, at present, these methods are directed toward people who are of average or above-average mental stability and who are not severely disturbed or psychotic. These techniques are not psychotherapy and are no substitute for therapeutic intervention in severe cases. I hope that one day ways will be found of applying the principles of metapsychology to the task of helping these very needy people. Meanwhile, the techniques discussed herein can help the vast majority.

Like any other general subject of study, metapsychology is not committed to a specific method, although methods exist as part of Applied Metapsychology, nor to a fixed belief system, although theories exist within the subject of metapsychology. It picks up where psychology, as the science of behavior, leaves off. Hence the name metapsychology has the correct connotation of being a study that goes beyond psychology—beyond the study of behavior to the study of that which behaves—the person him/herself—and the person’s perceptual, conceptual, and creative activity, as distinguished from the actions of the body. In this sense, metapsychology restores the original meaning of psychology as the study of the psyche, or spirit, and the applications of metapsychology reflect the perennial common goal of therapies, religions, and traditional philosophies, whether one calls this goal the attainment of sanity, of enlightenment, of happiness, of wisdom, or of salvation.

Throughout this book, I will be constantly consulting experiences that I believe we all have in common, as the basis for the points I am going to make. By consulting their own experience, readers can verify or falsify for themselves each of these points. I have assisted this process by including occasional brief exercises. These exercises will greatly enhance the reader’s understanding and will allow readers to verify for themselves the points made in the book. My only claim for acceptance of the ideas I am presenting is the assumption that different people have a great deal in common in what they experience and the way in which they experience it. This interpersonal commonality of experience is the fundamental truth that the metapsychological approach provides.

It took me many years of thinking and exploring a variety of different fields to arrive, eventually, at the conviction that this approach was best. Along the way, many different people and schools of thought have influenced my thinking.

It was John Goheen, then Chairman of the Stanford University Philosophy Department, who first kindled my interest in philosophy. In a seminar, Dr. Goheen, every bit the quintessential philosopher (complete with flowing white hair and abstracted manner) speculated: Perhaps it is love that gives meaning to life. For some reason (possibly because it was true), this statement made a deep impression on me. Dr. Goheen remained my mentor throughout my undergraduate years. It was under his tutelage that I studied Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (on which I did my Senior Honors Thesis) and R.M. Hare’s The Language of Morals (Hare, 1963). Both of these works greatly facilitated my thinking about ethics and communication.

After studying philosophy for a year at Cambridge University, however, I decided that my studies lacked purpose and applicability. I had always felt that philosophy ought to eventuate in a form of wisdom that would enable a person to lead the Good Life and to help others to do so. Modern philosophy, as I experienced it, seemed to lack wisdom.

I turned to psychiatry in the belief that psychiatrists must have a practical knowledge of life. After all, were they not daily involved in helping people solve their problems? For some reason, perhaps because my father was a physician, it never occurred to me to become a psychologist. During my five years at Yale Medical School, I was fortunate to receive a Freudian analysis from Dr. James Kleeman, a man whose personal characteristics, warmth, and ability to create a safe and therapeutic environment set a standard that has stayed with me ever since. I am sure I have incorporated many elements of his manner into my own style of helping. At least I hope I have.

During my residency training at Stanford University Medical Center, I had the valuable experience of working with Paul Watzlawick and others at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. They showed me that what was then a very unorthodox way of helping people could be quite effective.

During this time, I was profoundly disturbed by the work of Truex and Carkhuff (1967), who showed that the effectiveness of many current psychological approaches was by no means established empirically. I had also observed a lack of agreement amongst my teachers and colleagues with respect to diagnosis, prognosis, and recommended modes of therapy. In fact, there was no widely agreed-upon science or method in psychology. Each practitioner ultimately had to make up his/her own mind about what to do with each individual case. I was disheartened to find that the practical, predictable method for helping people I had hoped to find in psychiatry was not there. Also, having read several of Thomas Szasz’s brilliant books (Szasz, 1970, 1974), I became profoundly uneasy with the idea that helping someone to become happier had to be a medical or quasi-medical (therapeutic) action.

Therefore, while completing the last two years of my residency, I began to look outside of the more traditional schools of psychology and psychiatry. I looked into Gestalt therapy and encounter groups; I attended Esalen functions; I tried Psychocybernetics (Maltz, 1960) and Yoga.

Then came a thirteen-year interlude about which I have mixed feelings. These years were spent intensively studying and practicing the techniques of Dianetics and Scientology. Many people have advised me not to mention this episode in my life because the idea of Scientology sometimes conjures up disreputable images in the public mind. And thus, I was told, people would be predisposed to discredit my ideas. But these thirteen years, for all their negative aspects, proved to be a valuable learning experience. Eventually it became necessary for me to make a clear distinction in my own mind between:

•The organization (and its leaders: L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige), who have been perennially embroiled in controversy, and

•The theories and techniques themselves, many of which are quite humanitarian and have very positive effects.

In early 1984, once I had made this distinction, I made a point of severing all connections to the Scientology organization. What I am doing today has nothing to do with that organization, a fact about which both the organization and I are happy.

Despite our parting of the ways (which was not without drama) and despite the advice of some of my friends, I feel it would be wrong not to acknowledge the wealth of information I found in the Scientology materials. I have been able to put these materials to good use in my attempts to understand and align the data from all the various disciplines I have studied and to see the truths that all these disciplines contain. There was one year in which Scientology and psychiatry overlapped. During the day, I practiced conventional psychotherapy, and in the evenings I functioned as a Scientology practitioner. I found my work in the evening to be much more effective than the work I did during the day. This fact forced me to take the Scientology materials seriously.

These materials were produced over a period of more than thirty years. They were not only Hubbard’s work but also that of many other people, including tens of thousands of practitioners with a very high degree of uniformity in their practice and closely linked within a single organization. These practitioners could therefore compare notes and refine their ideas and techniques in a way that no group of psychologists or psychiatrists (with their disparate ideas and techniques and lack of organizational connections) could possibly do. It may be that there has never been such a large, organized, and homogeneous group of practitioners in any other helping profession. Certainly the number of practicing scientologists in the U.S. was, at least at one time, of comparable magnitude to the number of psychiatrists.

The wealth of practical and theoretical data accumulated thorough the actions and interactions of this group is extraordinary. There are probably hundreds of thousands of detailed case histories in Scientology archives. There are hundreds of books and thousands of tapes containing detailed descriptions of theories and methods. Much of this material is confusing, repetitive, wordy, and contradictory; some of it is secret; some of it is intensely interesting. I do not think anyone could read or listen to all of this material in any finite amount of time. I spent many years studying it, however, and I feel I have learned the most important parts.

Hubbard and the many others who have contributed to this collection of data, including important but less well-known individuals like David Mayo, Jan and Dick Halpern, and Jack Horner, have surely made a significant (if generally unrecognized) contribution to the helping professions. Techniques and theories developed by these individuals have found their way into many different commonly-used methods, including Co-Counseling, Life Spring, Landmark Forum, and even Gestalt Therapy. For a further discussion of this influence, see Bartley (1978); Grof (1985); Perls (1951).

Many of the ideas presented in this book are inspired by this wealth of Scientology material. Those who are familiar with the material will therefore recognize certain similarities between ideas and techniques mentioned there and those presented in this book. They will also see many differences. What I am presenting, in fact, is definitely not Scientology but something entirely different.

Other writers who have impressed me deeply include Sigmund Freud (who coined the term metapsychology, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn, Eugene Gendlin, and Charles Tart. All these thinkers have helped me to crystallize my thoughts concerning the subject of metapsychology.

Many other people have contributed valuable ideas, experiences, and suggestions and have helped to transform what was a mere collection of ideas into a completed work. Lynn and Neil Fetter, Peter Rowell, Martin Rattner, William Hendrick, and Don Palmer were regular attendees during months of weekly lectures and discussions I held on the subject of metapsychology during the writing of this book. They contributed many helpful ideas and suggestions. I am also indebted to Dr. Lewis Gann, Dr. Robert Moore, Michael Hanau, Amos Jessup, Paulette Mahurin, Barry Fairburn, Dr. O.W. Markley, Charlotte French, and Lewis Randall, all of whom waded patiently through the initial draft of my manuscript and offered myriad helpful suggestions and comments, most of which were incorporated into the final draft, and to Gail Gerbode, who contributed several important ideas to the book.

For the first edition, I would like to thank Patrick O’Connor, Ph.D. for his valuable work done in editing the English manuscript, to Chuck McDougal for his detailed commentary on the work, to Larry Voytilla for his help with the illustrations, printing, and production of the book. Michele Rae Vierra did a superb job of editing and proofreading the entire manuscript of the second edition. Gerald French also contributed many useful ideas and editorial suggestions to the work.

In recent years, others have made very significant contributions to this revision, particularly Marian Volkman, Ragnhild Malnati, Victor Volkman, and Margaret Nelson.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

This book is organized in three parts. Part One deals with the basic philosophical underpinnings and theory of metapsychology, Part Two provides a useful categorization of the various disabilities or undesired conditions that may arise in a person’s life, and Part Three presents a theory of personal enhancement and some examples of the very effective techniques currently used by practitioners of Applied Metapsychology.

Appendix I contains some helpful techniques that a person can use by him/herself or with others to enhance the quality of life. I hope that these will provide a good illustration of some of the basic techniques used in Applied Metapsychology, and if the reader can derive some personal benefit from them, so much the better. Appendix II provides data on Applied Metapsychology services, and where to obtain them.

The viewpoint I am consistently trying to take in this book is that of the world as seen by an individual person at a particular time. While I may sound as though I am making startling and counter-intuitive statements about objective reality (because it will be tedious always to prefix my statements by from the viewpoint of a particular person at a particular time), please realize that the only absolute assertions I intend to make are about the ways people construct and perceive their own worlds. If you find yourself outraged by something I am saying, before throwing the book down in disgust, try checking to see if, in the situation being described, you would experience the world that way and, if so, realize that that’s what I am talking about.

I encourage the reader to check each of my points against your own personal experience. The goal of metapsychology is to describe universal characteristics of experience, so what I have to say should either ring true when compared to carefully observed personal experience or stand disproved by that experience. I would be interested in hearing from any reader who, on thoughtful consideration of one of my points, finds that his/her own experience contradicts what I have said. Such feedback will be quite helpful in refining the subject of metapsychology.

There is an extensive glossary, containing some technical terms I have had to introduce, as well as a great many English terms to which I have had to give a restricted or specialized meaning. It is hoped that the reader will make very free use of this glossary, especially if s/he encounters a term that is puzzling or that has a seemingly odd usage.

Preface to the Fourth Edition

The first edition of this book, published in 1988, sold out very rapidly. The necessity of putting out a second printing gave me the opportunity to correct some errors, make some minor modifications of terminology, and add some new material, especially an expanded section on having in Chapter Two, a new section on intention and time in Chapter Three, and some technical modifications in Part III. The improvements contained in the second edition were based on the advantages of hindsight and on the very helpful feedback I received from readers of the earlier editions.

In the six years after the second edition came out, metapsychological thinking had progressed considerably, as had the methodology of viewing and facilitating. These changes were incorporated as articles in the Journal of Metapsychology and into various revisions of our training materials, but had not yet found their way into Beyond Psychology itself. During this time, we attained further insights into the nature of personal power (formerly called vitality. See especially the section in Chapter 4 on control and other theoretical points), and we modified, expanded, and improved the section on the General Curriculum. Other improvements were reflected in changes in the text, which was lightly re-edited throughout.

It has now been twenty-four years since this subject was officially launched and eighteen years since the last edition of this book. The basic theory and ideas remain more or less unchanged, but some changes in techniques and terminology and the need to provide an online version have motivated me to create this new edition.

Frank A. Gerbode, M.D., Founder

Applied Metapsychology International

First edition 1988

Second edition 1989

Third edition 1995

Fourth Edition 2013

Introduction

In any discussion concerning help, it is necessary to clarify who or what is being helped and who is to decide what constitutes help. A policeman, a judge, a politician, a philanthropist—all clearly have a mandate to help a group, a nation, or mankind as a whole. The results of their interventions must therefore be judged by their overall effects on the target group, not by their effects on any one person. People who are in the business of personal enhancement—teachers, counselors, therapists, priests, ministers, and personal consultants—are aiming to help a client (a person who has come to them for help) and their responsibility is to the client, not to anyone else. In personal enhancement, a successful outcome exists when the client is satisfied, not when, for instance, a group of people surrounding the client are satisfied with his/her behavior or personal characteristics. When a client is not satisfied with the help s/he has received, personal enhancement has not occurred, even if the counselor is content with the effects of the intervention.

Let us look at a situation a school counselor might be confronted with. Suppose a bright student, being bored, is always annoying his/her teachers by fidgeting, talking, or asking challenging or irritating questions. If the counselor, through behavior modification or medication, succeeds in creating a docile child out of this bored intellectual rebel, the counselor and the teachers may be happy, but has a good result really been achieved if the child feels dull or intimidated? If a client comes to a counselor in order to achieve happiness and completes the counseling miserable but externally functioning or behaving well in life, that is not a successful outcome for this kind of help. In other words, help, to the client, results in a more satisfactory life as experienced by the client, independent of anyone else’s judgments. It is therefore necessary at least to consult the client to determine what constitutes help for him/her and, subsequently, whether the proffered help is really effective. That is one reason why individual help is of necessity client-centered, or person-centered, to use Carl Rogers’ more recent term.

There is another sense in which personal enhancement is necessarily person-centered. Personal enhancement occurs when clients become more able, when they have greater potential for success—a clearer idea of their goals and improved means to achieve them. Anything, then, that would tend to lower awareness or ability is detrimental, rather than helpful. But how does one go about improving awareness and ability?

Consider what goes into teaching a person to play better tennis. It does not help to give the student a course in the physiology of muscle movement and a vector analysis of the forces and movements involved in a tennis stroke, nor to teach aerodynamics and the Bernoulli principle as applied to spinning balls, even though these are amongst the physical determinants of a tennis game. Such descriptions are useless toward improving a person’s tennis game. In order to improve someone’s tennis game, or any ability, one must address:

•Things that a person can experience directly.

•Things that a person can do knowingly.

If you tell a person to exert a tension force of 25 lb on his/her right latissimus dorsi, s/he will not be able to do so because the latissimus dorsi (though it exists physically) is not part of his/her experience as a tennis player. Nor can a person successfully calculate the torque s/he would have to exert on the handle of the racket in order to create an appropriate angular velocity on the tennis ball. Or, more technically, how to get the Bernoulli forces to operate in such a way as to cause the ball to curve downward at a rate of speed calculated to cause it to land inside the court, given its initial velocity and direction of flight. Rather, you must tell student tennis-players what sort of movement they can be aware of making that will eventuate in a successful stroke. They can and must learn how it feels to hit a ball properly. Unless the action of playing tennis can be brought down to an experiential level, they cannot improve their tennis game. Similarly, people cannot learn mathematics by learning about the chemical or electrical changes that might be occurring in their brain in order for a certain piece of mathematical knowledge to be there, assuming that anybody knows what those neurological changes should be. Also, it may or may not be the case that mental events are caused by neurological events. The causation might be in the other direction; in fact, it might go both ways. Fortunately, since we are dealing with experiential matters, and people don’t experience their brains, we don’t need to decide this question.

Rather, students must learn how it feels to solve a problem; they must learn how to think mathematically. They must learn how to experience mathematics. The brain may or may not act as a complex electronic calculator, but it is impossible to get a person to directly input information into the neurons in order to get a result. A person cannot experience the act of calculating that way, even if what is happening does involve the firing of certain neurons.

Freud started out as a neurologist, but he eventually recognized that talking about neurological structures or mechanisms was not going to help people handle their difficulties with life. He concluded that one had to talk with the client and consult the client’s experience. Thus the idea of the therapeutic alliance was conceived. It seemed also that experience itself followed certain laws. Freud coined the term metapsychology to describe the study of these rules, or the study of that which leads behind consciousness (Freud, 1966a). Others (such as Jung, Adler, and Horney) followed, each with his/her own theoretical schema to explain the organization and laws of experience.

After a time, however, it became apparent that a peculiar phenomenon was occurring. Freudians began having Freudian dreams; Jungians began having Jungian dreams: clients always seemed to find those structures or entities postulated by their therapists. Concomitantly, it seemed that clients tended to resent the interpretations and interventions of their therapists, which they sometimes experienced as dehumanizing and manipulative. Also, these methods often failed to achieve a satisfactory result in a short period of time. It seems that the imposition of a theoretical framework creates an artificial view of the world and in certain ways prevents clients from arriving at their own insights.

Enter the founder of person-centered therapy, Carl Rogers (1951). Rogers realized that clients somehow have to discover their own truths, that it is not helpful to spoon-feed insights to clients concerning supposed mental entities that clients cannot perceive. He saw the debilitating effect of expressing therapeutic interpretations or judgments. Such judgments tend to blunt clients’ ability to perceive the truth for themselves, since a person has to arrive at his/her own truth. If the client merely accepts a therapeutic judgment (even a correct one) without perceiving its truth directly, it has only intellectual validity for him/her and not the experiential validity needed for a truly therapeutic result.

Further, it was found that when a therapist invalidates clients or their observations by expressing disapproval directly or through facial expression or manner, or by using belittling judgments, clients seem to become fearful and less open. In this state, clients is less communicative and less perceptive. Rogers therefore introduced the concepts of non-directive therapy and of unconditional positive regard for the client as a therapeutic necessity. In the Rogerian scheme, the role of the facilitator or therapist is merely to make it very safe for clients to think and say anything, and to let clients know their communications are understood, by repeating or paraphrasing these communications back to them. The Rogerian counselor acts as a companion on the client’s quest toward self-understanding and self-realization.

When this approach is properly done, clients have found it very helpful and congenial, and they have achieved a certain degree of improvement with it. For many, receiving Rogerian counseling must surely be a unique opportunity to think and feel freely and to express freely these thoughts and feelings. This approach, however, also seems to be fairly slow and limited in what it can achieve. Clients may feel good about having companionship, but frustrated at not receiving much in the way of help or guidance. A similar difficulty exists in the Freudian free-associative approach. Although the analysand has to view and relay the material to the analyst, for most, analysis appears to be rather aimless and inefficient in the absence of a clear-cut theory of how experience is formed and in the absence of direction from the analyst. It appears that in helping another person one is caught between the Scylla of interpretation (or judgment) and the Charybdis of aimlessness.

Is it possible, then, to have a non-judgmental, non-interpretive method, one that matches the experience of the client every step of the way but uses a directive approach to achieve rapid and profound results? The answer lies in the fact that being directive is not necessarily the same as interpreting experiencing for the client or being judgmental. It is possible to direct a person’s attention without telling the person what s/he is to perceive. One can show a person a painting without telling him/her anything about the painting, or ask a son to examine his relationship with his father without telling him anything about that relationship. But in order to be directive without being judgmental, it is necessary to know what the client’s world looks like from the viewpoint of the client, and to know what the client (or any person) does to build up a particular world of experience. If all the rules governing experience can be expressed in a way that corresponds to people’s own perceptions, and if people can see what they are doing to handle their world or to construct it, then they can be given the means—in a way that is non-judgmental—to alter their experience (their life) to a more satisfactory one. If one can describe the actions a person must consciously take to relieve depression, directing a client to take these steps constitutes an effective, directive, but non-judgmental method. It can be done without referring to anything (such as the Id, Ego, Anima or Animus) of which the person cannot directly be aware.

An effective directive helping technique, then, consists of giving tools to clients that they can consciously use to change the quality of their experience. It need not involve any manipulation on the part of the person helping (whom we shall call a facilitator), nor any act of perceiving or acting for the client. The client consciously does all the needed actions and perceiving for him/herself, under the direction of the facilitator.

The facilitator, then, acts like an expert car mechanic talking to the owner of a car over the phone and helping him/her repair it. The mechanic, like the facilitator, must get the car owner to describe to him/her what the car looks like, perhaps what it sounds and feels like, what the various instruments show, and how the car behaves when the owner does certain things. Perhaps the mechanic gets the owner to rev the engine or turn on the headlights and describe what happens. The mechanic can suggest various actions, like Open the hood and take the lid off the big, black round thing sitting on top of the engine, to help the owner get a better view. Finally, from the owner’s description of what s/he sees, the mechanic can decide what is wrong and can then describe the various tools needed to fix it and where they can be found. The mechanic can then walk the owner through the steps necessary to repair the car, all the while having the owner report on what’s happening.

Similarly, an effective facilitator gets the client to do various things to assess the situation and find the problem areas. S/he then walks the client through various techniques to correct the problem. The client applies the techniques, not the facilitator, though the client does report frequently on how things are going.

My purpose in writing this book is to propose what I believe to be a clear description of what a client—a person—is, and the nature of his/her experience as perceived by the client (not by anyone else), a clear description of the nature of his/her intentions, actions, and judgments, as experienced by the client, and a clear description of the rules that the client can be aware of that affect identity, intention, action, judgment, and perception.

The individual person and his/her experience, as seen from his/her point of view, make up the proper subject matter of metapsychology. Metapsychology is the study of the person and his or her abilities, the origin, structure, and function of the mind, and the relationship between person, mind, and physical universe. It is the discipline that unifies mental and physical experience; it seeks to discover the rules that apply to both. Central to metapsychology is a study of how the person, the mind, and the world are seen from a person-centered viewpoint in the absence of any external viewpoint or judgments.

Thomas Kuhn (1970) made the point that, before a science comes into existence, there is a critical stage in the development of a discipline when a diverse group of thinkers and experimenters find themselves groping towards an understanding of the subject. Then, often abruptly, a paradigm or model appears that is so appealing and useful that it becomes almost universally accepted as the truth that defines the current state of the subject. At this point, a science is born, where before there was only a proto-science—a mere collection of conflicting ideas and unaligned data.

I feel that we are on the brink of such a revolution in the study of personal experience. Arnold Lazarus (1985) makes the excellent point that the field of psychotherapy is in a pre-paradigmatic phase. He says that without an agreed-upon theory to work from, we must simply observe what works and use that, without worrying, for the time being, about why it works. I feel, however, that the study of human interaction and helping has remained pre-paradigmatic for long enough. The basic data and observations needed to understand the subject have always been available to us—as our own experiences. No special instrumentation is required to observe these data. What I would like to propose in this book is a long-overdue paradigm—one that is sufficiently based on intersubjectively agreed-upon observations to be crystallization point for the formation of a new science: metapsychology.

PART I

THE THEORY OF METAPSYCHOLOGY

Chapter One

The Person and the World

In understanding the relationship between a person and the world s/he lives in, it is important to remember that people have different viewpoints. It is well known that when an accident occurs it is rare to find one hundred percent agreement amongst witnesses to that accident. One person thinks car A hit car B ; another thinks car B hit car A . One person estimates A ’s speed at 35 MPH, another at 50 MPH. It is a difficult task for an insurance investigator, a judge, or a jury to decide which viewpoint is the correct one. The business of compiling and comparing different reports to reconstruct what an omniscient observer would have seen at the time is a good and useful activity—in such contexts as that of determining fault in automobile accidents.

In other contexts, however—especially helping contexts, such as teaching or personal enhancement—it is useful to know how people come to see the world as they see it, to understand what conscious and non-conscious actions they take to arrive at a particular view of their world. It is also useful in such contexts to understand what people do to make changes in their world, how they consciously act to create a new environment for themselves. In order to help a person sharpen their perception of the world, for instance, the helper (or facilitator) must know what to tell the client to do so as to perceive better. A facilitator therefore needs to know what the client is currently doing in order to perceive, and what the client can consciously do in order to move from his/her current mode of perception to improved perception. It is of no help to a facilitator to be concerned with bodily mechanisms (such as neurological changes) of which the client cannot be directly aware. Rather, the focus must remain on actions of which the client can be directly conscious. When learning how to help someone, it is useful to study the rules that determine how people experience themselves and the world around them. These rules themselves cannot be merely invisible neurochemical mechanisms; they must themselves be evident in the experience of the individual.

Moreover, a person’s view of the world and the objects it contains will very likely change as time goes by. S/he plays different roles; s/he acquires more knowledge and data; the context changes. A person arriving at Disneyland may see a pine tree. On closer examination, that pine tree is found to be an elaborately-shaped piece of plastic. So at one point, the person sees a pine tree; at a later time, s/he looks at the same object and sees a piece of plastic.

The following questions must be addressed by anyone who truly intends to help someone:

•What are the elements that make up a person’s world of experience?

•By what kinds of actions can a person become aware of existing conditions in his/her world?

•What criteria does a person use to decide which of many possible world-views is valid?

•What criteria does a person use to decide which new conditions to create?

For certain purposes, it is important to judge which view is objectively correct. If one were looking for firewood, one would want to know whether a tree is made out of plastic or wood. But for the purpose of learning how to help people who are seeking to improve the quality of their lives, judging the correctness or incorrectness of a particular idea is not the crucial issue. What is crucial is to help them examine the process by which they have arrived at such a view and to give them tools for changing that view, if they wish to do so. Likewise, what is important is not judging the correctness or appropriateness of people’s action but helping them look at how they decided to act in that way and, if they wish, helping them find for themselves alternative ways of fulfilling their intentions. Suppose Mary thinks there are green snakes on the wall, that she is causing plane crashes by having bad thoughts, or that she can never recover from her husband’s death. From the point of view of providing help, the truth or falsity of these beliefs is not as important as the question of how Mary arrived at them.

The Person-Centered Viewpoint

This person-centered orientation is crucial to the context of personal enhancement and, in fact, to any form of interpersonal communication. The only way of helping another person—or even communicating to him/her—is to change something about his/her world-view. In order to do so effectively, one must first be at least somewhat aware of what the person’s current world-view looks like and one must have some idea of how that world-view came about—from the person’s point of view. To change a person’s world-view, one must take one of two mutually exclusive actions:

Apply force, duress, deception, or manipulation (physical, emotional, or financial) to get the person to accept the world-view you are proposing.

Understand why the person has the world-view s/he has and what the person can do to change his/her world-view if s/he chooses.

Under (2) is included:

Demonstrating facts to the person that s/he can perceive.

Helping the person to remove duress and force that is impeding or distorting his/her view of the world.

Helping him/her to acquire skills that s/he can use to change his/her world.

Each of these actions requires that the facilitator (or communicator) be able to see what the world currently looks like to other people and to help them adjust their own worlds in a way that makes sense to them. One cannot change people’s world-view just by pointing out that their world-view is false and exhorting them to correct it. Such invalidation of other people’s views is counter-productive. One cannot usually get others to change their mind just by telling them that they are wrong. To them, their view is not false. One might be able to succeed with a combination of invalidation, force, intimidation, and trickery, but this is hardly a desirable method. Absent the use of force and deception, one must start with what is true for the other person and understand why it is true for him/her, then demonstrate an acceptable way of making the transition from the current world-view to a new one. In other words, one must go about one’s work from a person-centered viewpoint—from an understanding of the present-time viewpoint of the other person and how the person can change it.

Personal Identity

There have been innumerable philosophical arguments concerning the nature of the self. The concept of the self fell into disfavor with modern analytical philosophers like Daniel Dennett (1969), who complained that it was based on grammatical and categorical misunderstandings. Likewise, behaviorists do not speak of the self but only of physical behavior. Yet everyone, even a dyed-in-the-wool behaviorist, acts as though his/her own existence were a basic fact of life. Therefore, I am going to accept pragmatically (with the majority) the concept that I exist, you exist, and others exist. For the rest of this book I am going to refer to myself, you, and other people as persons. I do this deliberately because I wish to distinguish us definitively from things, such as chairs, mountains, and telephones, that exist but are not sentient.

Assuming we exist, it is fair to ask: What is our nature? In attempting to answer this question, the best initial approach is to describe at least part of what a person can clearly see s/he is not. We will not, necessarily, then have a clear idea of what a person conceives him/herself to be. When I enumerate what a person is not, I do not mean to imply that a person is everything else! But we will be closer to understanding what a person is. I have already, by definition, distinguished people from non-aware objects such as tables, chairs, planets, stars, etc. But the question inevitably arises: What about the body? and What about the brain?

To begin to clarify the issue of personal identity, I give the reader two exercises:

Exercise 1. Change of focus - I

Read the above two paragraphs with a view to seeing how they align with your experience.

Now go through them again, but this time notice how each character is formed. Notice the spacing and the typestyle.

Note the change in focus from the first reading to the second.

Exercise 2. Change of focus - II

Throw a small object into the air and catch it.

Do the same thing again, but this time try to notice the exact speed and direction of the motions you are making with your shoulder, upper arm, forearm, wrist, hand, and fingers in executing the motion, and the exact trajectory of the object.

Were you able to do it?

Note the change in focus from the first time through to the second.

Focal and Subsidiary Awareness

In any act of awareness, a person has attention focused upon certain things while being aware of other things but not attending to them. When reading a book, I generally attend to the thoughts and concepts and, sometimes, to the words of the writer, but I am not, generally, attending to the letters or to the typographical details, such as the exact shape of the lower-case a. Yet I must, in some sense, be aware of the letters and their shapes in order to read the words, and I must be aware of the words in order to understand the concepts. When throwing something into the air, a person generally focuses on the object thrown and the position of one’s hand. Yet one must somehow take into account all of the bodily movements used in executing the motion successfully. Awareness that is focused on something is called focal awareness. Awareness of something on which a person is not focused, where that awareness contributes to a focal awareness, is called subsidiary awareness.¹

In Exercise 1, Step (1), you were focally aware of the concepts conveyed by the paragraph and only subsidiarily aware of the letters and their shapes. In Step (2), the focus was shifted to the letters and you became focally aware of them. In Exercise 2, Step (1), you were focally aware of the object, your hand, and their paths through space. In Step (2), the focus was on various parts of your body and their motions. You probably had a hard time catching the object while maintaining this closer-in focus in Step (2).

The principle of focal and subsidiary awareness is also well illustrated by the concept of a figure and a ground. Whenever one perceives something, one perceives it against a backdrop of something else. If something else were not there for contrast, the object would be invisible—camouflaged, in fact. A chameleon uses this principle quite effectively. In looking at a picture on the wall, I focus on the picture, but I am also subsidiarily aware of the wall as its ground. The subsidiary awareness of the wall makes it possible for me to see the picture. In some cases, it is easy to shift one’s focus back and forth, the ground becoming the new figure and the figure becoming the new ground.

Try the following exercise:

Exercise 3. Figure and ground

Look at Figure 1. What do you see?

Shift the figure and the ground.

Now what do you see?

Figure 1. Example of a figure and ground

This sort of selection of figure and ground occurs all the time in life, as we shift from one context to another. The figure is what we are focusing on, and the ground is what we are aware of but not focusing on at the moment. In other words, there are two kinds of awareness:

Definition: Focal awareness is awareness of that to which a person is currently attending.

Definition: Subsidiary awareness is awareness of that to which a person is not currently attending, but knowledge of which contributes to an act of focal awareness.

How does this distinction help us to understand what a person conceives self to be at a certain time or what identity a person has at a certain time? A principle that will aid our understanding is one proposed by Michael Polanyi (1962), a physical chemist turned philosopher:

Our subsidiary awareness of tools and probes can be regarded now as the act of making them form a part of our own body. The way we use a hammer or a blind man uses his stick, shows in fact that in both cases we shift outward the points at which we make contact with the things that we observe as objects outside ourselves. We may test the tool for its effectiveness or the probe for its suitability, e.g., in discovering the hidden details of a cavity, but the tool and the probe can never lie in the field of these operations; they remain necessarily on our side of it, forming part of ourselves, the operating persons. We pour ourselves out into them and assimilate them as parts of our own existence. We accept them existentially by dwelling in them.

A person tends to merge with the tools s/he uses to perceive and create and regards them as part of self. S/he regards as outside self that of which s/he is focally aware, that which s/he uses tools to perceive or act upon. In other words, from the person-centered viewpoint, a person is never that which s/he is perceiving or acting upon. A person is separate from that of which s/he is focally aware. From one moment to another, a person may extend, contract, or change that of which s/he is aware. Therefore, at different times, his/her identity may extend, contract, or shift.

Acts of Perception

People use various means of perception. They use each of the senses, but they also use telescopes, microscopes, radio, television, glasses, hearing aids, computer terminals, and the like to perceive the world. If you are skilled in the use of an instrument of perception, it becomes part of you, in your experience. Bodily sense organs require no less skill than non-bodily perceptual aids. Acquiring skill in using eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and other physical organs as perceptual channels is a major developmental task for an infant or small child. It takes a much longer time for an infant to learn to use his/her eyes than for an adult to learn to use a telescope. Studies of children who were locked up in institutions or dark closets for much of their early lives or otherwise deprived of the opportunity to exercise bodily abilities show conclusively that a failure to practice the use of sensory or motor apparatus in early years can lead to an inability to use them. Similarly, a person who has not heard and spoken French as a child will have some difficulty speaking and understanding it for the first time in adulthood.

When one looks at a house, one experiences the house as separate from self. Yet the act of looking at the house also connects one to the house. When cutting down a tree, one experiences self as separate from the tree, yet the act of cutting down the tree also connects one to it. In an act of perception, a person considers self as separate from what s/he perceives. And in an act of creating or changing something in the world, a person considers self as separate from that which s/he creates or changes. In the case of perception, it is the act of perception itself that both separates and connects the person and the perceived phenomenon. In the case of changed or created objects, it is the act of creating or changing that both separates and connects the person and the affected object. Both creation and perception are actions of a person. Therefore a person, by his/her actions, is both connected to, and separated from, the objects that make up his/her world.² Try the following exercise:

Exercise 4. Self-definition

Feel the texture and temperature of your chair.

Raise your right arm six inches. Where is it?

Note that in Step (1), you were aware of the chair as separate from you, and your arm was a part of you, whereas in Step (2), you were aware of your arm and it was experienced as separate from you.

Instrumental Skills

In addition to acquiring perceptual skills, people also become skilled in performing certain non-perceptual actions, such as playing a musical instrument or throwing a football. Polanyi calls these instrumental skills. As with perceptual skills, instrumental skills develop with practice. A young child needs to learn to use his/her body just as much as a teen-ager has to learn to drive a car. After the use of the body is mastered, as one uses the body to act on something else, the body is included as a part of self. After that, as one gains skill in using tools, the self-concept is extended past the borders of the body to incorporate these tools. A carpenter using a hammer to drive a nail incorporates the hammer as an extension of self, just as a good motorist extends self to include a car.

Finally, a person is separate from that which s/he conceptualizes at a particular time. When a person understands a word or symbol, the concept that s/he gets is seen by the light of understanding. At that moment, it is experienced as separate from the person. New concepts are based on and defined by already understood concepts: the concept five miles is based on the concept five and the concept mile. Concepts, in other words, may be used as tools and construction materials for constructing other concepts. While one is using one or more concepts as conceptual tools, one is aware of the new concept on which one is focusing at that moment. The subsidiary concepts that are being used to construct the new concept are experientially a part of oneself and are not regarded as separate thoughts.

Learning and Personal Growth

What do we mean when we refer to personal growth, increased awareness, or increased ability? Simply this: each time a person succeeds in perceiving, creating, or understanding, s/he tends to extend self to incorporate what s/he has perceived, created, or understood. The focus of attention or action moves outward. Each successful act involves the incorporation of an element of instrumental, conceptual, or perceptual skill into the person.

Although I have distinguished between perception, creation, and understanding, normally all three activities are present simultaneously in any given act. Driving a nail (a creation of a change) involves a correct perception of the nail in relation to the hammer and a concept of how to drive a nail. Viewing a star through a telescope involves skill in manipulating the telescope and a concept of what a star is and what a telescope is. One’s understanding of what air is—that it exists and has weight—can be considerably enhanced by an experiment in which one weighs a deflated basketball, then pumps it full of air, re-weighs it, and perceives that it is heavier. One’s ability to have this understanding involves being able to perceive a scale properly and knowing how to use a pump and a scale. Because of the value of physical demonstration in developing understanding, most science curricula include laboratory work. Part of learning a subject is developing instrumental skill.³

Unlearning and Relearning

Sometimes people reach a point of diminishing returns in trying to extend their capacity to understand, perceive, or create. When this happens, they must step back from their point of extension and examine things that previously were a part of them. They must, in other words, unlearn previously incorporated patterns of conception, perception, or creation that limit their ability. Then, having learned better skills, they can exercise them and extend self outward again in a better way.

To attain an optimum extension of self, it is often necessary to undergo a temporary contraction under controlled conditions, followed by a greater re-extension. One example of this process is the famous Cartesian Reduction, in which Descartes reduced his scope of knowledge to the simple proposition, I think, therefore I am. Having thus purified his thoughts, he proceeded to re-extend and recreate his ideas using the concept of God as a basis for this re-extension. Another example, involving instrumental skill, is that of a hunt-and-peck typists who have reached a limit in typing speed. In order to make a major gain in speed, they must step back and put their attention on what they are doing when they type the letter a, instead of just typing the letter a without trying to be aware of how they are doing so. They suffer a temporary reduction in identity from being a typist to being a student of typing. They retreat to a point from which they can examine the motion of typing the letter a in terms of finger position and motion. Here is where training and practice come in. If a simple action is practiced enough, a person can then do the action without attending to it. In other words, the person re-extends to incorporate the improved method of typing and can now again focus on typing the letter a, or even on typing whole sentences, and if the training was properly done it all goes a lot faster. Furthermore, after relearning the skill, one will be able to extend oneself further in the area of typing. Perhaps now one can focus on the content of what one is typing, where before one was focusing on typing the letter a. Typing the letter a has now become a part of the person.

The sense of contraction and introversion that follows failure could thus be viewed as a natural adaptive function. When this introversion is used and pursued systematically and thoroughly, an improved modus operandi is arrived at. But if, having failed, one does not use one’s introversion to repair or enhance one’s skill, then one simply retreats from that area of life. Consequently, one’s extension into that area may be chronically or permanently blunted.

Identity

In the above discussion, we have made some progress toward understanding what a person conceives self to be at a particular time. People play many roles and extend or contract their self-definition depending on what the context demands. I am going to use the word identity to refer to a particular role or self-definition that a person has at a particular time, including the various skills, assumptions, and characteristics that contribute to that self-definition. This usage of the word identity is a specialized one. I do not mean to imply that people change their basic nature from time to time nor to make any other metaphysical assertions about ultimate human nature or what a person really is.⁴ Having made these qualifications, I offer the following definition:

Definition: An identity is a package of viewpoints, tools, subsidiary awarenesses, and conceptual, perceptual, and instrumental abilities that can be incorporated as part of the self in order to fulfill an intention. Identity can also include the way in which a person chooses to appear to others.

A person has no fixed identity. In order to fulfill an intention, one assumes an identity. In doing so, one incorporates into oneself the conceptual, perceptual, and instrumental tools with which to carry out the intention. In carrying out an intention, one views, understands, or creates things outside oneself, as one currently defines oneself—that is, outside one’s current identity. As a skilled musician, one becomes one’s instrument, skills, and musical knowledge and acts to create a piece of music that is separate from self. Conceivably, one can even become the music if one is trying to do something else with it, such to impress one’s lover. At another time, the same person might become a teacher, incorporating teaching skills as part of self in instructing students. At yet other times s/he is being a car en route to rehearsals, or being a lover, or being a parent.

When speaking of personal expansion or extension as a goal, what we really want is to develop the ability to expand or contract freely at will. To realize full potential, a person must be able and willing to assume different identities at different times without becoming stuck in any of them. It was fine for Louis XIV to say, "L’état, c’est moi! (I am the state!") while he was using France to accomplish some international purpose, but to the degree that he became chronically fixed in this viewpoint, he must have suffered.

A desire for fame or power is not the only thing that can fix a person in an identity. Commonly, people get fixed in identities that are somehow safe or successful. They may have observed that someone else with this identity is doing well in life, so they decide they have to be that person (who serves as a role-model). Or the identity may be constructed, rather than adopted. A self-deprecating identity is sometimes constructed because, being already self-attacking, it is regarded as safe from external attack.

The goal of personal extension is not to extend oneself greatly and then remain indefinitely in an overextended state. A person must also be able to shed identities at will and become something simpler and less specialized. I have observed many instances of what I call the Great Person Syndrome. This occurs when a person, having made some genuinely fine contribution in a certain area (and having extended greatly in that area), incorporates the area chronically as a fixed identity. How often have we seen an able politician who cannot stop being one? Or a great actress who is always acting? A person thus fixed in being a certain identity loses the ability to assume other identities, such as that of a marital partner