The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

9. THE SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE OF INTERPERSONAL PROCESS

NOWADAYS ONE FREQUENTLY hears the relation between psychiatrist and patient described as a field of interaction in which the psychiatrist plays the dual role of participant and observer. The concept of the prime role of social interaction in the genesis of the psyche, largely the contribution of Mead in social psychology and Sullivan in psychiatry, is a valid and fruitful notion and marks an important advance over older psychologies of the individual psyche. Yet it presently conceals a deep ambiguity, and, as ordinarily understood, tends to perpetuate a divorce between theory and practice which cannot fail to impede the progress of psychiatry as an empirical science. It is the thesis of this essay that this ambiguity in both psychiatry and social psychology can be traced to an equivocation of behavioral terms such as sign, stimulus, interaction, and so forth, in which they are applied to two generically different communication events. It is further proposed (1) to call into question the behavioristic or sign theory of interpersonal process, (2) to outline the generic structure of symbolic behavior, and (3) to examine briefly its relevance for the therapist-patient relation.

The ambiguity is found in the way such behavioral terms as interpersonal reflexes, social interaction, and response are applied to what seem to be two different kinds of interpersonal events. This usage leads to confusion because it is not made clear whether the writers mean that the events are different and the terms are used broadly, or that the events are really alike and the terms are used strictly. On the one hand, the phrase interpersonal relation is often used with the clear assumption that what is designated is an interaction between organisms describable in the terms of a behavioristic social psychology.* On the other hand, the same term is extended to activities which are even recognized by the writers as being in some sense different from the directly observable behavior of organisms. The ambiguity appears in the description of the behavior of both psychiatrist and patient. Thus those studying the patient find it natural to speak of the objective study of his behavior and also of an “interpretive content analysis” of what he says.† And the behavior of the psychiatrist is described as “participant observation.” The psychiatrist not only enters into a conversation as other people do; he also preserves a posture of objectivity from which he takes note of the patient’s behavior, and his own, according to the principles of his science. One is free, of course, to designate all these activities by some such term as behavior or interaction. But if it is meant that these activities are really alike, it is not clear in what ways they are alike. Or if it is allowed that they are different, it is not clear wherein they differ or under what larger canon they may be brought into some kind of conceptual order.

The anomalous position of empirical scientists vis-à-vis intersubjective phenomena has been noticed before. Even Mead declared that an ideally refined behaviorism could explain the behavior of the observed subject but not that of the observing behaviorist. The social psychologist, it seems fair to say, sets out to understand social behavior as a species of interaction between organisms.‡ Yet by his own behavior he seems to allow for a kind of interpersonal activity which can be called “interaction” only by the most Pickwickian use of language. For the social psychologist observes, theorizes, and writes papers which he expects his colleagues not merely to respond to but to understand as well.* His behaviorism does not give an account of his own behavior. The awkward fact is that verstehen, that indispensable technique by which the social scientist discovers what another person “means,” is not provided for by neobehavioristic psychology. The anomaly is implicit in social psychology but explicit and acute in psychiatry because of the peculiar nature of the therapist-patient encounter. It is not possible to ignore the role of the scientist when he comprises one half of the social dyad under study. The social psychologist studies the interactions of persons and groups. But the psychiatrist is very largely concerned with the “interaction” between the patient and himself. And so the psychiatrist has come to be called the “participant observer.”

But the term participant observation expresses rather than clarifies a dilemma of the social sciences, and it should be accepted heuristically rather than as an explanation of what the psychiatrist is doing. The persistent ambiguity, however, is not occupationally peculiar to psychiatrists, and is not to be resolved by psychiatric theory. It comes about not as a result of some peculiar exigency of the therapist-patient relation but rather as a result of a fundamental incoherence in the attitude of empirical scientists toward that generic phenomenon of which the therapist-patient encounter is but a special instance: human communication. And it is to communication theory, considered both as the empirical science of symbolic behavior (psycholinguistics) and as a unified theory of signs (semiotic), that one must look for the source of the confusion and its resolution.

The Incoherence of a Behavioristic Theory of Meaning

About thirty-five years ago Edward Sapir called attention to a serious oversight in the then current psychology of language, writing, “…psychologists have perhaps too narrowly concerned themselves with the simple psychophysical bases of speech and have not penetrated very deeply into its symbolic nature.” He called for an empirical study of speech as a mode of symbolic behavior. Ten years later another great linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf, took issue with his colleagues’ practice of “recording hairsplitting distinctions of sound, performing phonetic gymnastics, and writing complex grammars which only grammarians read.” “Linguistics,” he reminded them, “is essentially the quest of meaning.”

The warnings of Sapir and Whorf have not been heeded. On the contrary. The trend of theoretical linguistics in recent years has been in precisely the opposite direction. Linguists are quite frank about their aversion to meaning, to symbolic behavior, as a fit subject for empirical investigation. As Carroll has summed it up, the trend has been away from a psychology of verbal behavior — that is, the empirical investigation of the language event as a natural phenomenon; the trend instead has been toward “communication theory,” which abstracts from the event itself and concerns itself with a statistical analysis of the capacity of various systems of communication, and “discourse analysis,” which is a formal determination of the recurrence of morphemes in connected speech. The upshot has been an incoherent attitude toward symbolic behavior. Language is held to be a kind of sign response and so understandable in behavioristic terms as an interaction between an organism and its environment — which consists, in this case, of other organisms.* At the same time, the peculiar status of symbolic behavior is recognized by treating it formally—there are no formal sciences, as far as I know, devoted to the syntax or semantics of animal utterances. Thus, there is a natural science devoted to the study of reaction times and learning behavior; there are formal sciences which treat the logic and grammar of sentences. But where is the natural science which treats sentence events — not a sentence written on a blackboard, but the happening in which a father, replying to his son’s question, utters the following sounds: “That is a balloon”?

A good example of this incoherence is to be found in the otherwise valuable discipline of semiotic, which seeks to unite the several disciplines of symbolic logic, psychological behaviorism, and semantics into a single organon.* Semiotic is divided into three levels or dimensions: syntactics, pragmatics, and semantics. Syntactics is, as one might expect, a formal science having to do with the logico-grammatical structure of signs and with the formation and transformation rules of language. Pragmatics is the natural science of organisms responding to signs in their environments — psychiatry would be considered a branch of pragmatics. Semantics, which has to do with the relation of signs and their designata, is not a natural science of symbolic behavior, as one might have hoped. It is a formal deductive discipline in which “semantic rules” are proposed, designating the conditions under which a sign is applied to its object or designatum† Thus, in semiotic, symbolic behavior is studied formally in syntactics and semantics, but is disqualified in the natural empirical science of pragmatics — or written off as a refinement of sign-response behavior.

The embarrassing fact is that there does not exist today, as far as I am aware, a natural empirical science of symbolic behavior as such.‡ Yet communication, the language event, is a real happening; it is as proper a subject for a natural science as nuclear fission or sexual reproduction.

Neobehavioristic social psychology is not able to take account of symbolic behavior, let alone provide a heuristically fruitful basis of investigation. To say so is in no wise to challenge the accomplishments of the behavioristic approach. Learning theory is still valid as far as it goes. Reaction times still stand. It is still quite true to say that when a conversation takes place between two people, a stimulus or energy exchange makes its well-known journey as a wave disturbance in the air, through the solids of the middle ear, as an afferent nerve impulse, as an electrocolloidal change in the central nervous system, as an efferent nerve impulse, as a muscle movement in the larynx of the second speaker, as a wave disturbance, and so on. One is still justified in calling the interpersonal process what Mead called it fifty years ago: a conversation of gesture in which my speech stimulus “calls out a response” from you. It is not enough to say this, however. For, as Susanne Langer rather drily observed, to set forth language as a sequence of stimuli and responses overlooks the salient trait of symbolic behavior: Symbols, words, not only call forth responses; they also denote things, name things for both speakers. Furthermore, behavioristic psychology is not able to take account of another universal trait of connected speech: Words are not merely aggregates of sound, however significant; in sentences or in agglutinative forms they also assert a state of affairs (or deny it or question it or command it). No alternative remains to the behaviorist semanticist but to disqualify the phenomenon of symbolization — to call it “an unreal but imputed relation between word and thing” or simply “wrong.” Again one is free to call symbolic behavior wrong or unreal or anything one likes, but such epithets hardly settle its status for the empirical scientist. It remains the task of empirical science to investigate phenomena as they happen, and everyone would agree that symbolic behavior does happen: People talk together, name things, make assertions about states of affairs, and to a degree understand each other.

The real task is how to study symbolic behavior, not formally by the deductive sciences which specify rules for the use of symbols in logic and calculi, but empirically as a kind of event which takes place in the same public domain as learning behavior. Sapir’s gentle chiding about the lack of a science of symbolic behavior and the need of such a science is more conspicuously true today than it was thirty-five years ago.

I am well aware, of course, that the altogether praiseworthy objective of the behaviorist is to get beyond the old mentalist nightmare in which interpersonal process is set forth in terms of my having “ideas,” “thoughts,” and “feelings,” and giving them names and so conveying them to you. If the word meaning refers to such mental entities, researchers do well to have nothing to do with it, for nothing has so effectively stifled the empirical investigation of communication as this misbegotten offspring of Descartes, the word-thing, the sound which I speak and which somehow carries my idea over to you like a note in a bottle. Yet the question must arise as to whether the alternatives lie only between a behavioristic theory of meaning, the energy exchange bouncing back and forth between speaker and hearer like a tennis ball, and the old miraculous mind reading by means of words. The phenomenon oíverste-hen, my understanding of what another person “means,” has been often called “subjective” by positive scientists and hence beyond the competence of empirical science. But such a ruling places the social scientist in the uncomfortable position of disqualifying his own activity — in the psychiatrist’s case, the activity of understanding his patient, writing papers, teaching courses.

Some Molar Traits of the Communication Event

The fact is that the generic traits of symbolic behavior are not “mental” at all. They are empirically ascertainable and have indeed been observed often enough. Both Ruesch and Jaffe have noticed that interpersonal events are peculiarly dyadic in a sense not altogether applicable to the interaction of the organism with its environment. Ruesch speaks of the structure of the interpersonal relation as a two-person system; Jaffe calls it a dyad. I would lay even greater stress on this feature as a manifestation of a generic trait of symbolic behavior. One may say if one likes that the bee dance is a communication event occurring in a two-bee system, but one is multiplying entities and it is not particularly useful to say so anyhow. A bee responding to another bee can be considered quite adequately as an organism in transaction with an environment, quite as much so as a solitary polar bear responding to the sound of splitting ice. But it has proved anything but adequate to consider language in the same terms. A symbol is generically intersubjective. I can never discover that the object is called a chair unless you tell me so, and my inkling that it “is” a chair is qualitatively different from the bee’s response to the bee dance of going to look for nectar.

Schachtel set forth another trait of symbolic behavior when he observed the genesis of an attitude among children which he called “autonomous object interest,” an attitude which he was careful to distinguish from need-satisfactions and wish fulfillment. It is not difficult, I think, to demonstrate that this autonomous object interest is intimately associated with the genesis of object language in the second year of life and is in fact an enduring trait of all symbolic behavior.

Two observations by Martin Buber are also of the utmost relevance to the basic structure of symbolic behavior. One of the main theses of Buber’s thought is his concept of relation, or the interhuman, which he holds to be beyond the reach of a behavioristic psychology. The other is the concept of distance. In contrast to the organism which exists wholly within its environment, man sets things at a distance. He is the creature through whose being (Sein), a phenomenon, “what is” (das Seiende), becomes detached from him and recognized for itself. Buber’s observations are developed within the framework of a philosophical anthropology; the traits of distance and relation are expressed as modes peculiar to human existence rather than as directly observable features of human relations. Expressed thus, Buber’s insights are perhaps somewhat uncongenial to many American social scientists with their strict empirical methodology — although it would be quite possible to defend the thesis that Buber’s analysis of human existence and human relations is also empirical in the broad sense of the word. It may be true that these existential traits of distance and relation are not “mental,” but they must strike the empirical scientist as vague in meaning and difficult to define operationally. Man is after all an organism, whatever else he is, and he does live in an environment. If he exists in uniquely human modes of being, such as distance and relation, it is not clear how these modes are grounded in or otherwise related to the present empirical knowledge of man. Precisely what does it mean to say that the human organism enters into the interhuman relation and sets things at a distance? Such theoretical grounding is, I believe, forthcoming from an empirical analysis of symbolic behavior. Indeed, it seems clear that Ruesch and Jaffe’s more-than-one-person system, Schachtel’s autonomous object interest, and Buber’s distance and relation are neither random nor reducible characteristics of human behavior. They are rather among the prime and generic traits of the highly structured meaning-situation found in symbolic behavior. What is more important, these traits are ascertainable not by a philosophical anthropology — which source is itself enough to render them suspect in the eyes of the behavioral scientists — but by an empirical analysis of language events as they are found to occur in the genetic appearance of language in the encultured child, in blind deaf-mutes, and in the structure of everyday language exchanges.

The greatest danger of the narrow behavioristic framework within which American behavioral scientists almost instinctively conceive the interpersonal process is that peculiarly human phenomena, such as language, are held either reducible to response sequences which leave out symbols altogether, or else describable by analogy, which does not so much shed light on the subject as close the door. Thus it may be unexceptionable to compare genes and symbols as the permanent characters of their respective systems and to speak of “levels of organization,” but such semantic shifts shed little or no light on intersubjective processes.* In an article about Buber, Leslie Farber wrote not long ago, “Having used only the single mode of scientific knowledge for the past hundred years or so, we are uneasily aware that this was the wrong mode — the wrong viewpoint, the wrong terminology, and the wrong kind of knowledge — ever to explain the human being.” This is true enough, I believe. There is a danger, however, in setting philosophical anthropology over against empirical science in such a sharp dichotomy. It is apt to confirm the positive scientist in his determination to have nothing to do with the existentialist-phenomenological movement — and so further impoverishes his social behaviorism. At the same time it encourages from the opposite quarter all manner of irrational and antiscientific prejudice — in particular the ill-assorted crew of post-Cartesian mentalists who want to rescue “man” from “science” and restore him to the angelic order of mind and subjectivity. No, the present crisis of the social sciences need not polarize itself into an ideological issue between American positivists and European existentialists. Surely the better course is an allegiance to the empirical method — but not, let me carefully note, an allegiance to a theoretical commitment. The watchword of the empirical social scientist who confronts interpersonal phenomena should be, Let us see what is going on, and not, Let us see how we can fit it into a stimulus-response transaction.

The Structure of Symbolic Behavior

It would not, perhaps, be inaccurate to say that American psychology, as well as other behavioral sciences, has settled on an eclectic behaviorism in which the cruder features of Watsonian psychology have been refined by the work of Tolman, Skinner, Hull, Mowrer, Dollard and Miller, Sears, and Angyall. In this view, also put forward at the pragmatic level of semiotic, the organism, whether human or subhuman, is regarded as an open system living in an environment and adapting to that environment through its response to elements which are called signs. A sign is defined as an element in the environment which, through congenital or acquired patterns of behavior, directs the organism to something else, this something else being understood either as some other element or simply as biologically relevant behavior. Thus, the scent of deer directs the tiger to the deer; the scent of the tiger directs the deer to flight. A good representation of this relation is the semiotic triangle, shown in Figure 5.*

The relations between signs and interpreters and between interpreters and objects are of the nature of space-time transactions between an organism and its environment and can be studied by a natural science. The relation between sign and object, shown in Figure 5 as dotted, has been called an imputed, as opposed to a real, relation. But this imputed relation is ambiguous. Does it mean that naming is folly and not the fit subject of a natural science, or does it mean that it is a formal relation and open to study only by a formal science? But naming does happen. People give names to things as surely as rats find their way through mazes.

The problem, it would seem, is how to give an account of symbolic behavior considered not in its formal aspects — as it would be considered by grammar, logic, and mathematics — but as a happening and, as such, open to a natural science.

Although the semiotic triangle is a useful model of stimulus-response arcs and of learning behavior, the fact is that symbolic behavior is irreducibly tetradic in structure, as shown in Figure 6.*

The second person is required as an element not merely in the genetic event of learning language but as the indispensable and enduring condition of all symbolic behavior. The very act of symbolic formulation, whether it be language, logic, art, or even thinking, is of its very nature a formulation for a someone else. Even Robinson Crusoe, writing in his journal after twenty years on the island, is nevertheless performing a through-and-through social and intersubjective act.†

The new ensemble of elements and relations which comes into being does not replace but rather overlays the organismic interaction. People still interact with each other behavioristically as much as do dogs and bees, but they also enter into intersubjective relations and cointend objects through the vehicle of symbols. It is possible, and indeed preferable, to describe symbolic behavior in an operational language which omits reference to mental contents or even to “meanings.” “Ideas” are difficult to define operationally and even more difficult to bring into coherent relation with the observables of behavioral science. As for “meanings,” the word is itself so ambiguous that there is more to be lost than gained from its use. It seems least objectionable to say that in the particular communication event under consideration, an organism intends such and such a designatum by means of such and such a symbol.

This approach still deals with elements and relations, just as does that of the neobehaviorist. A list of the elements and relations of the symbolic meaning-structure, and an example of their clinical application, follows.

The intersubjective community. Whenever behavioral scientists are confronted with a concrete language event, appropriate questions are: What is the community? What is the status of the intersubjective bond? Who is included and who is excluded? Is the community I-you-you or I-you-not you (as it is sometimes when one goes to a very high-toned lecture: we are listening and understanding, and we are quite aware that those out in the street are not)? The community may vary from a face-to-face confrontation of two people and the various colorations of the I-you bond, to the scattered and numerically unlimited community of mass communication in which one person communicates with others through various media. In the latter case, still other questions become pertinent. What is the effect of the interposition of the medium between speaker and hearer? When the President says on television, “I am counting on you right there in your living room to make a sacrifice,” is the sentence received in the same way as it would be in a face-to-face encounter, or is it apt to constitute itself for the viewer as merely another item of “what one hears” on radio and television?

It should be emphasized that this empirical approach does not require the settling or even the raising of the question of the ontological status of the intersubjective relation. The latter is introduced as a postulate which is valid to the extent that it unites random observations and opens productive avenues of inquiry.

The object and the world. The notion of world here is not an epistemological construct, as it is in much of European phenomenology. I am not saying that the world is constituted by the Dasein or the transcendental ego. Nor do I say that a tree is exactly as it appears. I say only that if one makes an empirical study of sign-using animals and symbol-using animals, one can only conclude that the latter have a world and the former do not. Nor does such a notion require the entity “mind” in one and eliminate it in the other. It has only to do with the observable difference between sign behavior and symbolic behavior. A sign-using organism takes account only of those elements of its environment which are relevant biologically. A chick has been observed to take account of the shadow of a hen and the shadow of a hawk but not, I believe, of the shadow of a swallow. A two-year-old child, however, will not only ask for milk, as a good sign-using animal; he will also point to the swallow and ask what it is.

A sign-using organism can be said to take account of those segments of its environment toward which, through the rewards and punishments of the learning process, it has acquired the appropriate responses. It cannot be meaningfully described as “knowing” anything else. But a symbol-using organism has a world. Once it knows the name of trees — what trees “are”—it must know the name of houses. The world is simply the totality of that which is formulated through symbols. It is both spatial and temporal. Once a native knows there is an earth, he must know what is under the earth. Once he knows what happened yesterday, he must know what happened in the beginning. Hence his cosmological and etio-logical myths.* Chickens have no myths.

Nor does the symbol refer to its object in the same mode as the sign does. True, one can use the word mean analogically and say that thunder means rain to the chicken and that the symbol water means water to Helen Keller. But the symbol does something the sign fails to do: It sets the object at a distance and in a public zone, where it is beheld intersubjectively by the community of symbol users. As Langer put it, say James to a dog, and as a good sign-using animal he will go look for James. Say James to you, and if you know a James, you will ask, “What about him?”

The genesis of symbolic behavior, considered both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, is an all-or-none change, involving a symbolic threshold. As Sapir observed, there are no primitive languages. Every known language is an essentially perfect means of expression and communication among those who use it. As Helen Keller put it, once she knew what water “was,” she had to know what everything else was. The greatest difference between the environment (Umwelt) of a sign-using organism and the world (Welt) of the speaking organism is that there are gaps in the former but none in the latter.* The nonspeaking organism only notices what is relevant biologically; the speaking organism disposes of the entire horizon symbolically. Gaps that cannot be closed by perception and reason are closed by magic and myth. The primitive has names for edible and noxious plants; but he also has a name for all the others: “bush.” He also “knows” what lies beyond the horizon, what is under the earth, and where he came from.

The distinction between Welt and Umwelt has been made before. Buber characterizes man as the creature who has a world and sets it at a distance, beyond the operation of his drives and needs. But, insightful as such an observation may be, it is of doubtful value to the behavioral sciences until it can be grounded in a coherent theory of symbolic behavior.

The being-in-the-world. Here again, my element is different from the Dasein of the existentialists, akin as the latter is to the transcendental subject of Kant and Husserl. It is no more than a working concept arrived at through the necessity of giving an account of the organism who participates in symbolic behavior. The organism who speaks has a world and consequently has the task of living in the world. It is simply inadequate to describe him in the organismic terms of adjustment, adaptation, needs, drives, reinforcement, inhibition, and so on. A psychiatric patient is, to be sure, an organism in an environment. He is also a creature who is informed by his culture. But he is something more. He is an organism who may not forgo the choice of how he is going to live in his world, for the forgoing is itself a kind of choice by default. It becomes pertinent to ask in what mode he inserts himself in the world. May has suggested that it sometimes seems more appropriate to ask a patient Where are you? rather than How are you? Certainly, becoming aware of the threshold of symbolic behavior makes one very curious about modes of existence: How does the person go about living in his world?

The intentional or quasi identity between the symbol and that which is symbolized. The mysterious “unreal but imputed” relation between the symbol and its designatum, the “wrong” identification of word and thing which the Polish semanticists condemn, never really fitted into a behavioristic theory of meaning. How did it come about that responding organisms imputed an unreal semantical relation between signs and things? How does an organism behave perversely by making a semantic identification at the “wrong” level of abstraction? What kind of organon is the unified science of signs when symbolic behavior is recognized as such by the formal sciences but disqualified by the natural sciences?

Once it becomes clear that what is to be studied is not sentence forms but particular language events, it also becomes clear that the subject of investigation in this instance is not the sentence itself but the mode in which it is asserted. The sentence can be studied only by a formal science such as grammar or logic, but a sentence event is open to a rich empirical phenomenology that is wholly unprovided by what passes currently as semantics. Nor can a neobehavioristic psychology make sense of assertory behavior; it can only grasp a sequence of space-time events which it attempts to correlate by constant functions. But assertion — the giving of a name to a thing, this is water, or the declaring of a state of affairs, the water is cold—is not a sequence. It is a pairing or identification of word and thing, class and thing, thing and attribute, and so on. Stimulus and response events are studied by a quantitative science. But the quasi identification events of symbolic behavior can be grasped only by a qualitative phenomenology. This qualitative scale must take account not only of true-or-false-or-nonsense statements (water is cold, water is dry, water is upside down), but also of various modes of magic identification. It does not suffice, for example, to say that the assertion of a Bororo tribesman of Brazil, “I am a parakeet,” is false or nonsense. Nor is it adequate to say that it is false scientifically but true mythically.* It is necessary to understand the particular mode of identification of a particular language-event.†

Sentences exhibiting the same syntactic and semantic structure may be asserted in wholly different modes of identification. For example, the sentence “My son John has become a roentgenologist” has the logical form of the assertion of class membership, a? A. It has this form regardless of the particular language event in which it is asserted. The sentence can be asserted in more than one mode, however. Thus, if a psychiatrist should hear his patient utter the above sentence, he may very well understand, knowing her as he does, that she is asserting a magic mode of class membership. Her son John has gone off to a scientific place where he has undergone a mystical transformation and emerged as a roentgenologist. Another patient may assert the same sentence and be quite clearly understood to mean that her son has acquired a skill which it is convenient to speak of as a class membership.*

The action sentence “John treats patients with X-rays” may also be asserted as a transparent vehicle intending a nonmagic action not utterly different from everyday actions of pushing, pulling, hitting, shooting, and so forth. Or it may be asserted magically: John makes a scientific pass with his paraphernalia and his ray, and the patient is cured.

The connotations of words themselves, apart from assertory behavior, undergo a characteristic semantic evolution which can be understood only by a science proper of symbolic behavior, for it is the particular word event which is studied and not the “semantic rule” by which it is applied to its designatum. The scale ranges from the almost miraculous discovering power of the word-vehicle as a metaphor in the hands of the poet, to its sclerosis through usage and familiarity until it becomes a semantic husk serving rather to conceal than to disclose what it designates. When Shakespeare compares winter trees with

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang†

the words come as fresh as creation from the symbolizer and serve to discover for the reader what he too saw but did not know he saw. But when, in everyday conversation, I tell you, “Last summer I went abroad and had some interesting experiences and saw some historical sites,” the words act as biscuit cutters carving up memory into the weariest shapes of everyday usage.*

THE SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE OF A THERAPIST-PATIENT COMMUNICATION EVENT

To determine how the generic structure of symbolic behavior is relevant to the therapist-patient relation as an instance thereof, I shall consider briefly a hypothetical language event.

Patient: “Here is a dream which may be of some interest to you. Since you are an analyst, I am sure you will agree it has psychiatric implications.”

Therapist: “Sounds interesting.”

Patient: “In this dream I was walking down a strange street. A sexy-looking woman standing behind a Dutch door beckoned to me. I hesitated for a second, then against my better judgment, I went into the house.”

Therapist: “Horrendous! [Pronounced heartily with a j: horrenjus!]” †

In the study of a spoken language event, a written transcription is, of course, wholly unacceptable.‡ All phonetics and vocal modifiers are omitted. Even a tap recording is inadequate since it does not transmit gestures. In my comment on this exchange, moreover, I will say nothing of such strictly linguistic analyses as might be made of phonemes, morphemes, and grammar. Nor shall I say anything about the “content” of the exchange — for example, the dream and its “meaning”—important though this may be in the patient’s dynamics. But if one does not consider the linguistics and content of the language event, what else remains to be said about it? What remains is nothing else but the particular structure of the symbolic behavior, of which the symbolic tetrad is the generic type (see Figure 2). The assumption that all that is going on is an interaction between organisms deprives the investigator of the means of taking account of the molar event of communication, leaving him only with the alternative of fitting as best he can the qualitative traits of interpersonal behavior into the Procrustean bed of a response psychology. But once the generic character of symbolic behavior is recognized, then the modes of intersubjectivity, “world,” “being-in-a-world,” and assertory identity are seen as particular expressions of the fundamental possibilities allowed by the structure of interpersonal process — just as drives, needs, reinforcement and extinction, stimulus, response, are the fundamental categories of organismic interaction.

The mode of assertory identity. It may very well be that some of the assertory behavior in this example is magical. The patient is an educated layman, the sort who takes pride in being well informed in scientific matters, especially psychiatry, and in his use of psychiatric jargon. He quite consciously uses “analyst” rather than “psychoanalyst.” One often notices in psychiatric interviews a kind of pseudo reversal of the roles of scientist and layman. The patient often uses such phrases as “Oedipus complex” (he would never say “inferiority complex,” since it passed long ago into everyday usage, passing, moreover, as a semantic husk of very questionable value), “sibling rivalry,” “aggressions,” and so forth, while the therapist is careful to steer clear of them, partly because he does not wish to use a technical phrase the patient would not understand, but perhaps even more because he is intuitively aware of the magic abuses to which expertise is peculiarly susceptible.* The patient in question may have, by reason of this very knowledgeability about psychiatry, fallen prey to a magic mode of identification. The clause Since you are an analyst very likely asserts a mystical transformation by which an ordinary human being is transfigured and informed by the resplendent scientific symbols “psychiatrist” and “psychoanalyst” and finally by the shorthand expression used among the elite, “analyst.”

The world of the therapist and his being-in-the-world. Insofar as he is a scientist, the therapist has assumed the posture of objectivity. As a consequence of what might be called the Thalesian revolution, men have learned, beginning at about the time of the Ionian philosophers and the Vedantists of the epic period,† to strike a theoretical posture toward the world which would enable them to discover the underlying principles and causes by which particular things and events can be understood. The scientist is not in his world in the same way, as, say, a member of a cosmological culture like the Bororo tribesmen, nor as a wanderer between cultures like Abraham, nor even as his fellow culture members, the businessman and the streetcar conductor. Insofar as he practices his science, he stands, in Buber’s phrase, “over against” his world as knower and manipulator of that which can be known and manipulated. The scientist may so be characterized without pejoration — indeed if he were in his world in any other way, he could hardly be a scientist. Yet as a psychiatrist, a “participant observer,” he must also re-enter the world in some mode or other as a person who is friendly and sympathetic, or anyhow appears so, to his patient.

The single utterance of the therapist, “horrenjus,” reveals a mode of the participant-observer stance, of necessity a kind of straddle in which the therapist stands outside and over against the world — including his patient — and yet enters into an interpersonal relation with his patient. He accomplishes the feat in this case through a kind of indulgent playfulness, tempered effectively, as McQuown comments, by his use of his pipe. The playful irony of “horrenjus!” pronounced with an exaggerated vaudeville-British propriety, expresses mock scandal at the patient’s decision to approach the woman in his dream, a device which serves at once to neutralize the patient’s anxiety and to extend to him a friendly hand: Come join me in a bit of good-natured deprecation of the Puritan streak in our culture. Yet, as sincerely warm as the therapist may feel toward his patient, there is hardly a second when his own objective placement in the world is not operative.* In fact, the very act which expresses his friendliness, the horrenjus! and the indulgent pipe-fondling behavior, also serves to set him gently but firmly apart as an elite-member, a tolerant Thalesian revolutionary who has made it his business to stand over against a sector of reality and study it according to the objective method.

The stance of the pure scientist is that of objectivity, a standing over against the world, the elements of which serve as specimens or instances of the various classes of objects and events which comprise his science. The behavior of the scientist, like any other mode of symbolic behavior, also implies a dimension of intersubjectivity; this is, of course, the community of other scientists engaged in the same specialty. Whether he is working with a colleague or alone, publishing or not publishing, the very nature of the scientific method with its moments of observation, concept formation, hypothesizing, verification, is a making public, a formulation for someone else.

But in the psychiatric interview the objective stance of the scientist with its attendant community of other scientists is overlaid by a second interpersonal relation, that of the therapist with his patient. This relation differs from that between the therapist and his colleagues. The latter is a Thalesian community, which is set apart from the everyday world by its esoteric knowledge of the underlying principles of some world phenomena. The relation between the therapist and his patient is, or at least might be, very much in the world. It might be called a Samaritan-Jew dyad — one man in trouble and another man going out of his way to help him.

The world of the patient and his being-in-the-world. This patient is in his world in a way wholly different from that of his therapist, yet it is a way which is heavily influenced by the presence of science in the world. The patient, let me postulate, is the sort of person who has also adopted the objective point of view but has adopted it secondhand. He is convinced that the scientific world view is the right way of looking at things, but since he is not a scientist and does not spend his time practicing the objective method, his objective-mindedness raises some problems. Deprived of the firsthand encounter with the subject matter which the scientist enjoys, he is even more apt than the scientist to fall prey to what Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”* and so to bestow upon theory, or what he imagines to be theory, a superior reality at the expense of the reality of the very world he lives in. His problem is not, as is the scientist’s, What sense can I make of the data before me? but is instead, How can I live in a world which I have disposed of theoretically? He is like the schoolgirl who, on seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, is unimpressed, either because she has already “had” it in geology or because she has not yet had it. Such a misplacement of the concrete is a serious matter because, although one may dispose of the world through theory, one is not thereby excused from the necessity of living in this same world. This patient’s mode of life is open to considerable anxiety and he is apt to conceive of his predicament and its remedy in the following terms: I am having trouble living in the world which I see objectively; therefore I shall apply for relief to the very source of my world view, the scientist himself. His seduction by theory is such, however, as to place him almost beyond the reach of the therapist. Paradoxically, it is his veneration of psychiatry which all but disqualifies him as a candidate for psychiatric treatment. For it is a necessary condition of the therapist’s method that he abstract to a degree from the individuality of his patient and see him as an instance of, a “case of,” such and such a malfunction.* But the patient is peculiarly prone to extrapolate a methodology into a way of living. He is pleased when the dream he offers to the therapist turns out to be a recognizable piece of pathology. He does not conceive a higher existence for himself than to be “what one should be” according to psychiatry. But science cannot tell one how to live; it can only abstract some traits from a number of people who do manage to live well — he has read no doubt that one should have an “integrated personality” or that one should be “creative” or “autonomous,” and the like. But the patient who sets out to become an integrated personality has embarked on a very peculiar enterprise. An almost intractable misunderstanding is apt to arise between therapist and patient. It is of this order: The therapist offers the assistance of the method and technique of his science and hopes that the patient can make use of it to become the individual he is capable of becoming. But the patient in his anonymity labors under the chronic misapprehension that he is trying to become “one of those”—that is, an integrated personality. The patient as good as asks: Am I doing it right now? Am I not now an individual in my own right?

The intersubjective community. The character of the community in this example may be inferred from the foregoing. The community is a special instance of the I-you dyad in which the inclusion of the patient implies a significant exclusion. The exclusion is significant because of its function in therapy. Although the encounter is that of a sick man supplicating a healer, a special status is conferred upon the patient by virtue of the technique itself. I may be sick and I may have come to a doctor for help, the patient is saying, but this is no ordinary therapy in which all I have to do is hold still while the doctor works on me; this is analysis. And a good bit of the exchange between therapist and patient consists of the patient’s acceptance of the therapist’s invitation to come see it all from where he sits, as a tolerant pipe-fondling Thalesian, to share in the analyst’s understanding of symptoms, social behavior, culture — an understanding obtained by an elite technique to which to a degree the patient can, by reason of his own gifts, also aspire. Although he may have failed and so needs help, he enjoys a privileged status vis-à-vis the people out there in the street. They don’t know what we know. They don’t even know about themselves what we know about them. Thus the we-community of scientists — I, the therapist, and you, the patient but also now the surrogate scientist — can become a useful therapeutic instrument by means of which the patient’s low self-esteem is offset by Thalesian insights into himself and the society he lives in.

The interpersonal process is a multilevel one. Some estimation of its immense complexity is made possible by realizing that there occurs at one level the interaction between organisms which the behaviorist speaks of. Conversation is still a space-time journey of energy exchanges between organisms in all its molecular complexity. But this interaction is overlaid by the molar structure of symbolic behavior. Symbolic behavior is in turn as many-tissued as there are participants in the language event and as there are media of communication. The world and the being-in-the-world of the therapist collide with the world and the being-in-the-world of the patient. The possibilities of communication failure are unlimited. Yet it is not sufficient to say that one man says something and another man hears and understands or misunderstands, agrees or disagrees, rejoices or is saddened. It is also necessary to ask and try to answer such questions as: In what mode does the listener receive the assertion of the speaker? In what mode does he affirm it? In what way does his own mode of being-in-the-world color and specify everything he hears?

Perhaps what needs most to be emphasized is the intimate relation between the phenomenological structure of intersubjectivity and being-in-the-world, on the one hand, and the empirical event of symbolic behavior, on the other. The existential modes of human living do not take place in an epistemological seventh heaven wholly removed from the world of organisms and things. Rather do they follow upon and, in fact, can be derived only from this very intercourse: one man encountering another man, speaking a word, and through it and between them discovering the world and himself.

* See, for example, David McK. Rioch: “The theory [Sullivan’s theory of interpersonal relations] is very effective in dealing with the behavior of organisms, as it provides a comprehensive framework for dealing with the interaction of multiple factors, including the observer.”

† See, for example, Joseph Jaffe: “The measurement of human interaction has recently been approached through a variety of techniques, ranging from interpretive content analyses to objective recording of temporal patterns in behavioral interaction.”

‡ “Social psychology, considered as a branch of psychology, is the study of individual responses as conditioned by stimuli arising from social or collective situations; considered as a branch of sociology or as collective psychology, it is the study of collective responses or of the behavior of groups and other collectivities.” (L. L. Bernard, “Social Psychology.”)

* See Chapter 12.

* A symbol, according to Charles Morris, is a sign produced by its interpreter which acts as a substitute for some other sign with which it is synonymous. Thus hunger cramps might take the place of the buzzer announcing the food and become a symbol for the dog.

* See Chapter 11.

† See also Alfred Tarski. Other writers interpret semantics not merely as a formal science but as a quasi-ethical science in which users of words are scolded for not using them at the proper level of abstraction. See, for example, Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity.

‡ General linguistics is, of course, an empirical science, but, except for acoustics, only at the comparative level. In phonetics, phonemics, morphophonemics, syntax, and lexicography, the linguist describes the structure of the languages of the earth as they are found to occur. What one fails to find in the literature, however, is an empirical study of the language event in itself as a generic event. It is much as if biologists were interested in describing the various kinds of mitotic division among different species, but were not interested in studying the process of mitosis.

* I have in mind Paul Weiss’s exasperation with behavioral scientists’ perennial recourse to such terms as levels of organization. “We are struck with a lack of a practical, realistic, analytic approach that will go beyond the mere statement of the fact that we have hierarchical nature, that it does consist of a system of Chinese boxes one inside the other, that they are integrated, interrelated, coordinated and all these other terms.”

* This schema, which is designed to apply alike to animal behavior and to human speech, follows, in the main, that of Morris with modifications by Ogden and Richards.

* Cf. p. 259.

* And even Samuel Pepys. For, although he kept his journal for himself and in a private code, he was nevertheless formulating experience and so setting it at a distance for a someone else — himself.

* Much of the formulating and objectifying function of the symbol has been set forth by Ernst Cassirer; see in particular vol. 1, Language. But the empirical insights are so submerged by the apparatus of German idealism that they are salvaged only with difficulty. Cassirer was concerned to extend the Kantian thesis to the area of culture and symbols and so to establish that it is through symbols that one not merely knows but constitutes the world. The task of the behavioral scientist is different. He confronts symbolic behavior from the same posture with which he studies sign behavior: as events in a public domain which he shares with other scientists. He sees people using words to name things and to assert states of affairs, just as he sees rats threading their way through mazes. He is concerned to explain what he sees by the use of mechanisms and models. I confess that this posture presupposes a species of philosophical realism.

* This notion of world and environment is close to the Welt and Umwelt of the Binswanger school. See Ludwig Binswanger, “The Existential Analysis School of Thought,” in Existence. It is important to note, however, that this distinction is yielded by an empirical analysis of the language event and does not depend for its validity on the Daseinanalytik of Heidegger or on any other philosophical anthropology.

* It is characteristic of the current confusion of the behavioral sciences that theorists find themselves speaking of true myths and are even driven to the extremity of prescribing myth as such for the ills of contemporary society. (See, for example, Henry A. Murray, “A Mythology for Grownups.”) The confusion can be traced, I believe, to the failure of behavioral theory to give an account of different modes of symbolic activity, in this case that of scientists and nonscientists. Thus when psychiatrists and clinical psychologists say that people nowadays need viable myths, they seem to be saying that scientists are different from people: scientists seek the truth and people have needs. Coherent theory would not, presumably, require such a generic distinction.

†The Bororo does not intend that he is literally a parakeet (he does not try to mate with other parakeets), yet he clearly intends it in a sense more magical than ordinary factual statements. See the “mystic identification” of L. Lévy-Bruhl in How Natives Think.

* Lévy-Bruhl’s categories of “iprelogical” thought are not, in my opinion, a genetic stage of psychic evolution but simply a mode of symbolic behavior to which a denizen of Western culture is as apt to fall prey as a Bororo.

† Sonnet 73.

* Ernest Schachtel has described this “articulating and obscuring function” of language in “On Memory and Childhood Amnesia.” He gives a good example of the sterility of the conventional phrase in which one distorts the ineffable content of memory — as when one reports having an “exciting time.” He says, “No object perceived with the quality of freshness, newness, of something wonder-full, can be preserved and recalled by the conventional concept of that object as designated in its conventional name in language” (p. 9). It seems to me, however, that he is describing terms that have deteriorated in their semantic evolution rather than the entire spectrum of language itself. Symbols may conceal, distort, render commonplace, yes; but since people are not angelic intelligences, symbols are their only means of knowing anything at all.

†”Horrenjus” is borrowed from Norman A. McQuown’s linguistic analysis of an interview reported by Otto A. Will and Robert A. Cohen, but the exchange is otherwise hypothetical and is offered not as clinical evidence but only illustratively, to exemplify some traits of symbolic structure.

‡ Reading is, it is true, an event of symbolic behavior, but it must be studied as such, as an event open to an appropriate phenomenology and not as a substitute for hearing.

* What psychiatrist has not been disturbed by this penchant for “scientizing” concrete experience? When, for example, a patient reports that he has a “personality problem” at the office, the psychiatrist may pay proper respect to his patient’s knowledgeability and objectivity, but he may also have good reason for wishing that he had said instead, “Oh God, how I hate my boss!”

† A time which Jaspers has called the axial period in world history.

* Much of what the existential analysts call being-in-the-world is overlapped by the social scientist’s concept of role taking — although the former also calls into question the authenticity of a self constructed only of roles. The notion of role taking, moreover, hardly does justice to the radical placement in the world required of anyone who has crossed the symbolic threshold.

* Whitehead speaks here of the “great confusion” which the fallacy has brought to pass in science and philosophy. In my opinion, it has caused greater confusion among lay people and, what is worse, an impoverishment of the very world one lives in.

* As Sullivan pointed out, psychiatry, insofar as it is a science, must have to do with the general and not the individual. “Let me say that insofar as you are interested in your unique individuality, in contradistinction to the interpersonal activities which you or someone else can observe, to that extent you are interested in the really private mode in which you live — in which I have no interest whatever. The fact is that for any scientific inquiry, in the sense that psychiatry should be, we cannot be concerned with that which is inviolably private.”