CONCLUSIONS

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The Itinerary Completed

The main conclusions I have tried to draw have been to raise questions. I mean this in two strong senses. (1) I propose that the most consequential conclusions to which we arrive are the questions we ask:

[A person's basic assumptions, even when] they are not stated, find expression in the forms of his questions. A question is really an ambiguous proposition; the answer is its determination. There can be only a certain number of alternatives that will complete its sense. In this way the intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.... In our questions lie our principles of analysis, and our answers may express whatever those principles are able to yield. (Langer, 1957, p. 4; italics in original)

And, (2) I propose that a form of social life oriented toward the process of questioning has, by that very fact, decisively -- and differentially -- determined the overall substantive shape of its unfolding. A person or association of persons open-endedly committed to questioning everything has no fixed qualities, "specific defenses, attitudes, functions or... any other structural property, but [is] characterized exclusively by... responsiveness to rational, verbal communications which do not contain more than interpretations" (Eissler, 1953/1980, pp. 394-6).[1] The presence or absence of such an orientation cannot, however, be read off from syntactic classification of manifest content of speech acts, but only by becoming familiar with the spirit (the metacommunicative context) of persons' communicative interactions. Jacob Bronowski relates that the physicist Niels Bohr "used to begin his lecture courses by saying to his students, 'Every sentence I utter should be regarded by you not as an assertion but as a question'" (1973, p. 334).

Instead of studying [whatever] through the lens of an unwittingly subjectively constituted objective (third-person, spectatorial) dichotomy between facts and values, I have endeavored to bring into greater awareness the existentially given (first- and second-person, engaged) mutual implicature of facts-in-values and values-in-facts (Ruesch & Bateson, 1951, pp. 179-80), in which the here foregone alternative (objective, third-person study of [whatever]) is contextualized as an alternative. Focal attention to reality has its role in life, the more so the more urgently circumstances impinge on us. But while such comportment may seem to be straightforward (the agent feels he or she is directly dealing with the things themselves), we have seen that it takes for granted and unquestioningly applies an extensive complex of generally dubitable and frequently dubious presuppositions (Hall, 1981, passim).

We have looked inward, not merely introspectively, but in a world-open sense of trying to see what we are doing "here-and-now" ("self-reflection"), in an attempt to orient ourselves to what's really going on (Husserl, 1950/1973, pp. 156-7). It is perhaps useful after all to describe such an undertaking by an intimidating label such as "a hermeneutics of facticity," to help hold in mind the eschatological significance of the "here-and-now" -- its depth, which makes sense, for instance, of John Caputo's otherwise trivializing distillation of Heidegger's philosophy into the assertion that "all that is called for in a given situation is to make the best of it" (September, 1989).

The self-reflective turn opens up the "it" of the given situation to include its givenness, and, indeed, its givenness for and to the -- in each case: "my" -- self as an inter-locutor in the ideal community of all possible speakers and hearers, for whom the openly all-inclusive horizon of everything is noetic correlate. This ontological situation was explored in the first, theoretical section of the dissertation. The particular social situation in which it was explored, in the second and third parts of the dissertation, was interaction between supervisor and supervisee in psychotherapist training: a usually unostentatious 45-50 minute weekly meeting of two usually unnoteworthy individuals (one of whom hasn't yet even earned a degree, much less "made a name for him or herself"), wherein, when the interaction goes well, the two usually slouch informally in facing chairs and speculate about the trivia of some other people's lives.

What we hopefully accomplished has been to see ways to realize the abstract potentialities of the theory in the concrete circumstances of this practice, as a model for how to go about doing the same in other -- especially other equally quotidian -- areas of life. We saw how the interactions between supervisor and supervisee could easily have no more inner than outer richness, so that, for the participants to become aware of some exciting event in external reality would definitely liven things up, as a distraction to which they would spontaneously turn with, at most, moral ambivalence (guilt over not attending to what they should be doing). On the other hand, we saw how these very same tedia vitae could be transfigured into engaging epiphanies of insight and nurturing moments of mutual recognition by the participants attending to their own ongoing process.

Suppose (e.g.) the supervisee had been reluctantly tolerating a client because the client had been assigned by the institute's training committee, and, in consequence, even though the supervisee finds the client sullen, boring (etc.), the supervisee feels constrained to stick with the case to pass the requirements of the training program. One day, the supervisor remarks to the supervisee that the latter's discussion of the case seems perfunctory, and asks if the supervisee is only treating the client because he or she feels they have to. Suddenly, the supervisee may find him or herself taking a genuine interest in the supervision, an interest which then spreads to include also an interest in the client whom the student now sees as in a predicament similar to his or her own [(e.g., if the client was remanded to treatment as a condition for parole, etc.)]. --Far from depending on any enhanced external stimuli, this constructive process can fuel its vitality precisely through the obstructive attributes of the client which had previously been a source of discouragement and a drain on the supervisee's energy.

The itinerary we have followed is not completed. Contextuality has no end: each new communicative act ipso facto brings into existence its nonthematized metacommunicative frame (this content can be thematized only in a subsequent communicative act which, in its turn, produces its unthematized metacommunicative frame...). And the a priori (transcendental) [pre]constitution of experience has no beginning: we can never get behind what appears (the attempt to do that can result only in further appearances...). Paradoxically, however, the itinerary set forth may be complete in a synoptic way, somewhat like specifying f(0) and f(n+1) completely defines a recursive function [although here, as in the computer game of "life," the values the function assumes for particular n's may be unanticipatable prior to actually working them out, and, when discovered, surprising], or diagonalization provides complete instructions for generating a real (uncompletable) number. In any case, this dissertation is only an itinerary: a map, and an invitation to go on a journey (a path to take in the journey of life). As such, as I proposed in my introductory remarks ("Itinerary" section, above), it cannot be compelling, but it hopefully is not arbitrary[, and, even more hopefully, it is appealing!]. Pursuant to the performative tension I have argued is intrinsic to self-accountable conversation, I propose that to examine to what extent and in what ways what one is doing [whatever it is] may be arbitrary intrinsically provides grounds for such activity meriting being considered not arbitrary.

This dissertation aims to offer a contribution to orientation in the only place in which we can ever find ourselves: "the tenuous webs of conversation" (Boulding, 1956, p. 45), of talk and self-talk, in which, [in each] here and now, we are. It offers an "image of elaboration, situating [what is given] in a space which is neither... empty... nor... filled to overflowing [suffocating], but a ventilated space, a space which is neither that of 'this is meaningless' nor that of 'this means that' but one of 'this may mean that'" (Green, 1975, p. 8).

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Some Reflections on the Broader Context

In each of my rescripted examples, the participants not only learn something about psychotherapy, they also become wiser persons (including as psychotherapists). And the particular kind of wisdom they acquire, unlike much that derives from misfortune, enriches appreciation of constructive and satisfying possibilities of living (joy), as well as ability to cope with suffering (sorrow and pity). The communicants' habitation of their communicative home is enriched, in its here-and-now actuality and their expectation of its future potentialities. In each of the rescripted examples the participants would, through their interaction, establish more rewarding, more supportive relationships in which to live from henceforth.

There were strategic reasons for limiting my focus in this dissertation to this very narrow and rather "out of the way" part of the communicative world. Foremost was the prospect of affecting the real social world. As I stated at the beginning, my primary interest here is not to produce theory but to operationalize it, i.e., to give some appealing possibilities better opportunities of happening in my own and others' lives. Most pedagogical reforms require institutional action, which I take to be beyond my power to effect (if I had power to shape a psychotherapist training program, I would have produced a different kind of dissertation[; as stated earlier, this dissertation is in a way the outcome of my failed attempt to shape a psychotherapy program from the position of student rather than Dean, or even faculty member...]). For supervisors and/or students to try out -- and, I hope, reap significant benefits from -- the suggestions I make herein, requires "only" that, as individuals, they attend to what transpires in the supervisory situation(s) in which they are already engaged. By felicitous coincidence, it also seems to me the potential payoff of these proposed "simple," no-cost changes for the effectiveness of psychotherapy training (both the process and its outcome, i.e., the quality of therapy to which it leads) may likely exceed that of many kinds of elaborate curriculum reform (etc.). Of course the present suggestions also offer hints how they could be made even more effective by being integrated into curriculum, etc. Communication theory [instruction based, e.g., on Ruesch and Bateson (1951), Hall (1981), Habermas (1968/1971, 1983/1990), Wachtel (1993)] could be accorded a central place in the curriculum. Classroom interactions between teacher and students (another asymmetrical communication structure...), no matter what the particular material being studied, offer many opportunities for self-reflective learning (example #3 above is an instance).

Another reason for choosing to focus on the supervisor-supervisee relationship in psychotherapy training is the potential social "multiplier" effect: Psychotherapists spend their professional lives modifying other persons' (a.k.a.: patients') communicative orientation in life. Enriching the therapists' own communicative orientation will likely have constructive effects on all those other persons (the clients), and, in a further trickle-down effect, upon the persons with whom the latter in their turn will interact more productively due to their growth through therapy.

The question arises as to the role of self-reflection in the making of man's conversational home. All conversation has a self-reflective aspect (or, to use William James' term: "fringe" (see, e.g., Wild, 1963, p. 46)), insofar as the structure of mutual recognition requires that each participant be aware of the other's awareness of his awareness that each recognizes the other's recognition of their mutual recognition (etc.). Conversation is always "in a way" self-reflective, if only to the extent that a participant implicitly realizes he or she must refrain from "pressuring" the other if there is to be conversation (as opposed to strategic interpersonal interaction) (this is similar to Heidegger's notions that [wo]man is the being whose existence always includes a pre-understanding of the nature of being, and who is not an entity but rather the clearing in the midst of being in which entities can manifest themselves as being).

I am proposing, however, to raise this (what we might call) communicative ecosystem to a disciplined undertaking which persons thematically pursue in a cumulative way, i.e., to constitute it as science[2] ("communication ecology"?). There are basically two reasons for this proposed reorientation: (1) to maximize and maximally secure the goods of conversation, not only against the vicissitudes of the social unconscious, but also because these goods are emergent (they do not exist in the world unless and until persons produce them), and (2), in our present cultural condition, where anything that is not constituted as a "science" tends to be disregarded, unfunded and fall out of existence, to see to it that the massive research endeavors of our society nurture rather than inadvertently undermine their own base, which, I have argued, is conversation. Merely by studying everything except conversation, we may squeeze conversation out of life.

Thematic study of the conversation-we-are would be a good in any place and time, but in our present historical moment, when we are massively modifying our communicative ecosystem, it has a methodological exigency for securing the self-reproduction of our social life which does not seem to be being given anywhere near sufficient attention. We devote many resources to telecommunication but few to metacommunication, many to studying virtual reality but few to studying the structures of the Lifeworld, many to multimedia but few to deutero-learning, many to affirming diversity of cultures but few to confronting how we are determined by our own culture, many to deconstructing texts but few to reconstructing the conversation we are[3].... It is not just an [empirical] issue of redeploying person-hours from group-A to group-B tasks; it is more consequentially a[n ontological] decision whether to consciously situate the one group of activities in the context of the other. In fact they are so situated even if we don't think (recognize) they are, because "everywhere that communication happens, language not only is used but is shaped as well" (Gadamer, 1981, p. 4). The transformation -- and reformation -- I am urging is another step in the infinite [and not inevitable!] task that where anonymous-factical process was (and still is), there responsible action shall be.[4]

With good luck, good conversation can nurture persons "naturally." In a recent article on mentoring in psychotherapist training, one person nominated as a good mentor by two of his former students, Prof. Emeritus Earl Koile (Univ. of Texas at Austin) reflects (Koile, 1993) on the mentoring relationship from the mentor's perspective. He mentions such general attributes as joint immersion in a challenging task, with student and mentor having high expectations of each other:

Our energy and motivations are high and often tinged with excitement and anxiety. The outcomes are unpredictable. A former student, now a colleague, expressed the feel and flavor of the process: "Your expectation was that I would join you on the high wire. I didn't know what it would be like. I would tell myself, 'It's scary, but exhilarating . . . and I'll do it.'" (p.11)

In training and supervision I like to use what may feel like failures---missed cues, botched responses---to teach and demonstrate recovery skills. Practicing these skills becomes fun; refining them builds confidence and empowers trainees and experienced therapists alike. In this climate where we are free to fail and recover, the freedom to learn usually thrives. (p. 11)

A more consequential problem, is helping assure that supervisors do this kind of supervision and that supervisees expect it (to help assure they get it, and, when they do not get it, to clearly see what is happening to them instead, in order to be able to cope effectively with their misfortune). Occasional testimonial statements are not likely to be highly effective in this regard. As Heraclitus said (Fragment 2): "...although the Logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding" (Kirk & Raven, 1957, p. 188).

Thematized, disciplined and institutionally cumulative work is needed. When any part of life is thematized as a discipline, it changes its place in life, and, consequently, modifies the overall constellation of life in general. (Example: All humans prepare and eat foodstuffs; modern nutritional science changes, in varying gross and subtle ways, not only what people eat, but the activities in which they engage vis-à-vis alimentation, including, for one entirely new phenomenon: that some persons now spend large parts of their lives investigating how to improve nutritional practices and training other persons to do this, thus constituting a new autonomous sphere of life.[5]) By repositioning self-reflection in psychotherapy supervision into scientific (i.e., thematically self-elaborating and self-correcting) discipline, I aim to increase its constructive potential, as well as its social visibility and influence.

I have indicated the outlines of a basis in theory of communication for the critical examination and reconstruction of all aspects of social life. All social life is grounded in conversation; that ground itself can be made a subject of conversation. There is research to be done here, but it does not take the form of finding out "what people in fact do." Instead it takes the form of reporting the process and results of "trying to do the best we could." Or, to be more precise, even when [persons deem that] an appropriate object of study is some aspect of "what people do," each such situation also generates a correlative possibility of studying "our" choice to do that study as an instance of "trying to do the best we could," as an aspect of the empirical undertaking's transcendental accounting for itself.

...[T]he self-forgetfulness of investigators devoted to objective methods is often surprising. Every statement about the behavior of things necessarily contains an implicit reference to the behavior of the observer, no matter whether we are dealing with scientific experiments or everyday occurrences. (Straus, Natanson & Ey, 1969, p. 63)

...a progressive transformation that ultimately draws into its orbit all ideas proper to finitude [i.e., pre-reflective immersion in any given pattern of life] and with them the entire spiritual culture of mankind... [--] a revolutionizing of all culture... that affects man's whole manner of being as a creator of culture.... This takes place in the form of a new kind of practical outlook, a universal critique of all life and of its goals.... whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal... reason... on the basis of... constant reflectiveness... and thus to transform it into a radically new humanity made capable of an absolute responsibility to itself. (Husserl, 1965, pp. 163, 164, 169, 181)

...as I said, mankind understanding itself as rational, that it is rational in seeking to be rational; that this signifies an infinity of living and striving toward reason; that reason is precisely that which man qua man, in his innermost being, is aiming for, that which alone can satisfy him, make him "blessed".... (Husserl, 1954/1970 , pp. 340-1; italics in original)

Ruesch and Bateson (1951, pp. 178-82) stress that every message has a double aspect of reporting what-is (a.k.a.: "fact") and also urging the transformation of what-is in a certain way (a.k.a.: "value"). Persons' socialization need not disclose to them this "transcendental clue" to the opening up of the cultural unconscious. If, by whatever vicissitudes, a person's socialization does make him or her aware of this, then they may discover they have a tool to begin to decode and demystify the rest of experience ("the image"; the communicative social matrix), and even recover its productive ground in the originary event of symbolization: the event that we, in naming a thing, are the place where what-is manifests itself as being. As I argued above, conversation can sustain itself, qua conversation, on any "content." Louis Kahn said:

All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light. (Lobell, 1979, p. 5)

The thrust of this dissertation has been to make conversation an issue for conversational life: "The thematization of some aspect of experience places that experience in a horizon of expectation" (Natanson, 1973, p. 205). If, to restate this proposition in simpler words, I have "let the cat out of the bag," so that, after having read this dissertation, persons will no longer be able to not see certain performative discrepancies between the talk in which they engage and the context in which they engage in that talk -- and the attendant opportunities for life which otherwise would have been missed and missed out on --, and if, in consequence, persons develop an increased interest in being on the lookout for such mystifications of experience in all the interstices of the communicative interactions of daily life, and if, in addition, I have enriched their sense of the comforting and even appealing possibilities of communication, I shall have accomplished my purpose.

Return to Brad McCormick's dissertation Table of Contents.

Conversation: Building For Dwelling[6]

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as men migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." (Metzger & Murphy, Eds. 1991, pp. 14-5)

In our present social situation where the weight on society of maintaining and coping with side effects of large engineering projects has in many cases more than offset the relief from burdens upon life which those undertakings initially lifted from our (or our predecessors') shoulders, the aspiration of building a tower to heaven, or even maintaining the skyscrapers we have already erected, must appear ambivalent. Even the idea of a great radio transmitter broadcasting "our name" to the heavens (we have been broadcasting "I Love Lucy," etc. for over half a century already...) must appear equivocal in light of recent questions about health effects of non-ionizing radiation.

In any case, we have already built many cities and towers. The builders at Babel could have finished their city and tower and then God have confused their tongues. Since we "[wo]men in the age of technology" (to borrow Arnold Gehlen's phrase), no more made the world than those first Babel-onians, we can never be sure any efforts will be enough to protect us from communicative collapse. Just as much as in primary oral cultures, we, in the present age of fiber-optics and CD-rom, depend on the unbroken oral [(and even kinesic: Fingerspitzengefühl)] transmission of meaning from one living person to another, lest all our great libraries and computerized data repositories come to confront us in the same "dumb" way as the Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared before Champollion (God need not leave us a Rosetta stone this time) (see, e.g., Kuhn, 1970, p. 47; Feyerabend, 1987, p. 111).

The story of Babel suggests that, if there is a chance for mankind to become fully human (to transcend that transitional form "human nature" toward self-accountability, i.e., to go beyond factical [(i.e., happenstance, i.e., ultimately meaningless)] meanings to accountably grounded meanings), conversation directed to objective ends is not likely to be enough. If the persons at Babel had a chance, they would have needed to self-reflectively cultivate their own conversation, in addition to that conversation dealing with the issue of designing the architectural edifice in which the conversation could occur. Having prepared for a possible confusion of tongues, they might have been better able to cope with it when it hit them.

Even this will not be sufficient to guarantee success, and it may not be enough to accomplish success, but it at least exhausts the resources we can bring to bear to try. It is not a question of major engineering projects, at least in their engineering dimension (although that too is important, just as case management is important in psychotherapy). It is an issue of self-reflection in all communicative interaction, insofar as it is where persons "are at the time," including when they are engaged in engineering activity in technical workplaces (e.g., the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center), and also everywhere else (as urged above), from the boardroom to the bathroom, and, most important of all in the "training of children" (Husserl, 1965, p. 174), where culture reproduces itself. I have proposed a way to do this in the particular communicative situation of supervision of psychotherapist training, which I hope is sufficiently quotidian to suggest how to go about trying similarly to transform other areas of everyday life.

Whenever two or three are gathered together in His name, The Word of God is present [(Matt. 18:20)]. Wherever you go, you will be a polis [(Arendt, 1958, p. 198)]. A city is not a physical edifice but a certain kind of conversation which needs a physical edifice in order to exist:

The city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.

...The city, from a simple settlement, became the place of assembled institutions. The measure of its greatness as a place to live must come from the character of its institutions, sanctioned by their sensitivity to desire for new agreement, not by need, because need comes from what already is. Desire is the thing not made, the roots of the will to live. (Louis Kahn, in Lobell, 1979, pp. 44-5)

["Not yet and yet already" (Broch, 1945/1945, p. 61, my translation, from suhrkamp taschenbuch 296, p. 60).] The discourse in which persons share the world with each other, in living and in dying, is, it seems to me, the real "final frontier,"[7] and always-at-the-same-time our real home. I hope the study of self-accountable conversation which I have herein presented has illustrated and explicated this simultaneity of persons' fully being-at-home in their communicative here-and-now and also being-on-their-way toward unforeseeable further advances, in a way that may both inspire persons (e.g., yourself, my reader) to seek this and also help them -- help us -- effectively go about accomplishing it. Conversation gets interrupted; it has no end.

The word by way of preface which seeks to break through the screen stretched between the author and the reader by the book itself does not give itself out as a word of honor. But it belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights. (Levinas, 1961/1969, p. 30)

Go to afterthoughts about this dissertations ("5 years later").

Footnotes

[1] I feel there is a resonance between Eissler's characterization of a "hypothetically normal ego" (p. 394), here, and the protagonists of Robert Musil's [suggestively] named novel, The Man Without Qualities (1930-1932/1954). Perhaps this dissertation suggests how Ulrich and/or Agathe would have dealt with the training situation, had they decided to give a try at becoming psychotherapists.

[2] By the word "science", I am here referring to a certain kind of self-perpetuating and self-elaborating institutionalized social praxis, without regard to the question whether a particular instance of that kind of praxis (a particular so-called "science") produces a particular kind of validities. The salient attribute here is the focus of social energy on a clearly delimited domain of systematic research, not the appropriateness of having constituted that domain as a focus for research.

[3] Again, I emphasize the distinction between objective study, as contents of the conversation-we-are, of communicative events which occur (i.e., which are not the communication event which the conversation-we-are is), versus self-reflective self-study of the conversation-we-are, in which self-examination those contents' roles as objects may be critically evaluated. (Note: Since writing this, I have found my phrase "the conversation we are" used in Gadamer, 1965/1975, p. 340).) Playing with the title of Fischer's article (1970), one might propose the maxim: "Every testee a co-evaluator!"

[4] "Wo Es war, soll ich werden" (S. Freud, 1969, p. 68); see, e.g., Ragland-Sullivan, 1986, p. 12.

[5] For example, at Teachers College, there is a department of Nutrition Education which "[s]ince its founding in 1909... has maintained an emphasis on training persons capable of serving as translators of the findings of nutrition science to a variety of publics" (Teachers College Columbia University 1989-1990, 1989, p. 326). This description shows how such disciplines elaborate themselves not only "horizontally", i.e., by advancing knowledge in their object domain, but also "vertically", by constituting meta-levels of appropriation of that knowledge, in this case, e.g., training "translators" to facilitate persons in other parts of the social world to make use of it.

[6] I have borrowed this phrase from the title of Heidegger's essay: "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" (1971, pp. 143-161).

[7] "The final frontier" is, of course, part of the epigraph of the television series Startrek: "Space: the final frontier." Hermann Broch's two most important works, The Sleepwalkers (1931/1947) and The Death of Virgil (1945/1945), each conclude with an image of one variant of what I am proposing instead as the ultimate horizon of human existence. The Sleepwalkers ends with the image of a man being called back to life by the community at the point where he is about to kill himself because he failed to carry out his responsibility to the community: "Do thyself no harm, for we are all here!" (p. 648). "The Virgil" (as the latter work is fondly called) ends with Virgil dying in a redemptive communication event: "It was the word beyond speech" (p. 482). Both these open dimensions, of the elaboration of co-subjectivity and its extremity, seem to me unsurpassable.

Go to afterthoughts about this dissertations ("5 years later").

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