Intentional Action, Empathy, and Psychotherapy

Intentionality and its observed manifestation as intentional action are central concepts in psychology. In the realms of cognitive neuroscience, psychoanalysis, the practices of cognitive and behavior therapy, and various humanistic approaches to psychology, everybody talks about intentionality but often without clarity or agreement on meaning. This is a common problem in psychology.

The formulation of Intentional Action used in Descriptive Psychology is serviceable across other disciplines and is intended to be part of the general conceptual framework of psychology.  It is particularly useful when comparing and coordinating different theories in the behavioral sciences. The existing theories pay attention to certain aspects or parameters of Intentional Action while underplaying or ignoring others. 


Intentional Action is the general case of purposeful, goal directed activity and is a common feature of all behavior. 

The varieties of Intentional Action specific to Persons are Cognizant Action and Deliberate Action. In Cognizant Action people know they are engaged in some sort of an Intentional Action.  (This will be represented by the small diamond above the Knows parameter). In Deliberate Action people both know what they are doing and are choosing to do so from a set of known options.  (This will be represented by multiple small diamonds above the Knows parameter). Cognizant Action highlights the person's "conscious awareness". Deliberate Action highlights the person's choices in the circumstances. Not all a person does involves cognizance and deliberation, but the ability to behave cognizantly and deliberately is fundamental to the Paradigm Case of Personhood. 

Here are the parameters of Behavior as Intentional Action. Each parameter is a conceptually separate distinction required for a full appreciation of an Intentional Action. For some descriptions of behavior, we might not need the full set. For some purposes, we might only be interested in describing a behavior's performance, or what the behavior achieved, or the stimulus and response, or the behavior's significance, and so on. Here's the full set, unless you can think of more.  

Here's a way to represent Cognizant Action. The representational convention used in Descriptive Psychology is for the Diamond to be a shorthand way to represent an Intentional Action. 

The question marks on the small diamond in the Knows parameter are to remind us of the "more or less" and uncertainty features of awareness. 

And here's a way to represent Deliberate Action:

IA=Intentional Action; I=Identity; W=Wants; K=Knows; KH=Knows How; P=Performance; A=Achievement; PC=Personal Characteristic; S=Significance.   Adapted with permission from Joe Jeffrey, Ph.D

The larger blue diamond notations are a shorthand that represent an Intentional Action without commitment to the Identity of the actor, the Significance of the act, and the Personal Characteristics that the act reflects. The little blue diamonds represent the person's Intentional Action options given the circumstances. In a Deliberate Action, the actor is both Cognizant of what he is doing (IA in K) and Chooses to do it (IA in W).

The full case of Intentional Action has the conceptually separable parameters of Identity, Wants, Knows, Knows How, Performance, Achievement, Significance, and Personal Characteristic.

The parameters are pre-empirical.   They refer to distinctions that locate the "empirical data" but are not themselves a discovery in nature. They are akin to the "X" and "Y" axis of plane geometry. The parameters provide the framework for organizing the empirical data. Finding the specific content of the parameters requires observation. The parameters remind us what to look for.

The remarks that follow concern each of the parameters and focus on their use in maintaining an empathic relationship during psychotherapy. They could just as well serve as reminders for understanding any other activity that requires an adequate map of behavior. 

Wants. Perhaps the most general answer to the question of why someone does something is answered in reference to some state of affairs that the person wants to bring about. Wants refer to the motivations or values that are involved in how people appraise their opportunities and dilemmas given what they see as their options in any given circumstance.  

Although the paradigm case of human behavior involves a cognizant person knowing their values and being able to deliberate, i.e., choose whether or not to act on the values, it is also clear that a person can act on motives and values that are not consciously or accurately recognized (Schwartz, 1984). We would be blind if we didn't see that some of our actions involve motives we are reluctant to own (Kris, 1982). 

Distortions in reality may be a part of transforming the intolerable or unthinkable into the more manageable. A maxim: what a person acts on successfully tends to become real for her. This is the domain of psychological defense and the dynamic unconscious, a traditional focus of psychoanalytic inquiry. 

Motivations and opportunities that create reluctance or unconscious defense require empathic tact to be explored.  The analytic attitude of nonjudgmental empathy that establishes the “conditions of safety” (Schafer,1983) are traditionally employed. The therapeutic relationship has to be safe.  Safety comes first. Analysis second.

Some reminders:  Actors and their observers might be accurate in knowing what “wants” are in play or they might be mistaken.  Even when known, people might not be in a position to articulate what they want. Clarity and accuracy have a “more or less” quality and this will hold for the content of all the parameters. It is important to keep this in mind since insistence when attributing motivation, especially when there is disagreement or discomfort, tends to disrupt the safety of a relationship and may foreclose on exploring and appreciating the complexity of the situation. There is often disagreement, and people are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge what they know to be the case. 

What a person wants is often simple, clear and easy to say. Other times, it is complicated, multiply determined, conflicted, murky, ambiguous or “unspeakable”, especially in the dilemmas that bring people to therapy.  People often sense their complexity even if they are not able or ready to talk about it, and this is frequently the case when they feel they are not understood. They may have reason to expect misunderstanding. 

Telling someone the reasons you think they act as they do is frequently met with the rejoinder, “but it’s more than that”, since it often is.  And some people take offense when told what they are feeling especially if it intrudes into their privacy.

Ossorio (2013) indicated that there are four classifications of intrinsic or fundamental motivation:  hedonic, prudent, aesthetic, and ethical.  There may be more. They intrinsically provide reason enough to do something. They stand on their own. These reasons for action can conflict, operate in a complementary or independent fashion, and so on. If you have two or more of these reasons to do something, you have more reason than if you only had one.  Any general theory of the human behavior that does not adequately address these motivations will be defective.  

Hedonics refers to pleasure, prudence to self-interest, aesthetics to values of truth, rigor, objectivity, beauty, closure or fit, and ethics with concerns of right and wrong, of fairness and justice.  Hedonic and prudent motivations can operate consciously, pre-consciously or unconsciously.  Aesthetic and ethical motivations require the actor is eligible to choose or refrain from an action, to potentially deliberate about a desirable course to follow.  In the service of being able to choose, a person’s aesthetic and ethical motives are often consciously available (Schwartz, 1984).  I can’t help it that it feels good, or that I see it as in my self-interest, but I can consciously attempt to refrain from seeking pleasure or self-interest on aesthetic and/or ethical grounds.

Another point. Not doing a pleasurable act because of utter coercion, overwhelming guilt, or unconscious taboo may appear to be an ethical performance, but if the actor had no choice, their performance was not one of renouncing pleasure or self-interest but of forced constraint. A person can appear to do “the right thing" because he had no choice.  It might be a mistake to point this out. Without enough shared history, it is hard to judge how a critical observation will be tolerated. This is a key feature of therapeutic tact and why careful listening comes first and may take considerable time before problematic motivations and constraints are interpreted. 

A person's observable performance and their psychological state are conceptually separate. This is why they involve distinct sets of parameters. Identical performances may follow from very different motives or appraisals. 

What a person wants is often not a simple matter. An empathic appreciation is respectful of this. It can be the case that what looks intended is instead accidental or coerced, and in those situations the empathic response acknowledges the absence of motive. Still, while we tend to be skeptical of the claim that “the devil made me do it”, it pays to be sensitive to why a person makes such a claim. The empathic therapist waits until it is safe enough to suggest otherwise.

Knows.  Along with the basic question of why a person does something comes the question of why they are doing it now. The answer will always be some version of their recognition, correct or not, that the current circumstance provides an opportunity to do something they now want to do.  Action requires a correspondence between motive and opportunity.

The Knows parameter contains the range of concepts, facts, and distinctions a person has available and employs in a given situation. Knowledge, a personal characteristic, is acquired by observation and thought. Knowledge is relevant to the extent that it involves recognitions that can be acted on, differences that make a difference in behavior. As a rule of thumb, people tend to notice what they value, including what they want to avoid. People can also act on distinctions and not be cognizant of making those distinctions, just as people might not recognize an opportunity when it stares them in the face.

A person might be wrong about what they know and this will have consequences especially if they believe they are competent or eligible in ways they are not.  Knowledge can be clear or unclear, certain or uncertain, serviceable or unserviceable. Knowledge relevant to behavior is evaluated on how effectively the known distinctions can be employed, and this necessarily has a “more or less” quality to it.

The Knows parameter includes the potential awareness or cognizance of one’s own actions and potential choices.  Cognizant recognition of choice is an aspect of Deliberate Action, and is a conceptual requirement for an ethical perspective to be employed or considered.  The recognition of choice or option, including the potential to renounce a choice, serves as one of the ordinary standards for accountability.  Negligence occurs in situations where community standards hold that an ethical dilemma ought to be recognized but isn’t. Significant negligence of ethical consideration with attendant action (or inaction) is central to most formulations of criminality and tort (see, e.g., Prosser, 1941).

The eligibility for certain recognitions and choices has a learning history.  The empathic actor knows this about the other.  Given where and how someone has grown up, what can they be expected to know?  What we expect people to know will be influenced both by shared cultural expectations and by an appreciation of the idiosyncratic.  Even though membership in a culture involves knowing standard choice principles, we should be careful what we presume.  Similarly, understanding that a person might have an underdeveloped or diminished capacity is also part of the empathic observer’s knowledge of the other. If a situation would ordinarily call for a person to do something, if they lack the relevant knowledge (or values or competence), they will do something else instead. A person can only act on the values, concepts and skills they have available unless their performance is coerced (or they get lucky). 

Know-How. An action is always an expression of a particular skill, competence, or know-how if it is something a person can expect to perform non-accidently.  Competence is acquired through having a prior capacity and the appropriate practice and experience.  Not everyone has the needed prior capacity, practice and experience to develop the competencies a community might take for granted. And some people are more talented than others in acquiring or exceeding the expected skills.  Their performance can look like magic (Putman, 2010).

Having the relevant know-how means that a person can perform an action in a variety of ways with the expected outcome that the actor achieves what is intended. Think of driving a car or dancing with a friend or throwing a fastball high inside at ninety-five miles an hour. Drivers, dancers and professional pitchers have their expected know-how acquired by having the prior capacity and sufficient practice and experience. Behavior going wrong calls for an explanation once adequate competence has been achieved; behavior going right requires no explanation.  Bobby’s walking toward the couch and sitting down requires no explanation, but his repeated stumbling does.

Akin to what some call procedural memory, once competence is acquired, people are rarely self-conscious of each move necessary in the performance of a task. We tend to be more self-conscious when we believe, correctly or not, that we lack the competence to act in the manner a situation demands. The absence of self-recognized competence may turn what would be opportunity into threat, manageable hazard into feared danger.  It is unsurprising when worry, anxiety or panic are features of a situation when a person believes they lack the relevant competence to handle a problematic or even desired state of affairs.  This is why the Know-How parameter is of special relevance to what a person can tolerate (Schwartz 2002).

Defensively, we are only somewhat able to tolerate how we are seen or what we consciously know. Defensive styles represent personal characteristics, sometimes unconscious, that limit or shelter a person’s awareness to what they can tolerate at any given time. Defenses may be automatically applied even when a person has outgrown their serviceability. The empathic clinician keeps this in mind.  I think that a good deal of successful “interpretations of defense” are a result of an empathic therapist recognizing that the client can now tolerate what in the past gave them good reason to remain defensively unaware. What was good to avoid in infancy and childhood may no longer be intolerable, even if the person hasn't recognized this yet. Successful confrontation that a person can do more than they claim follows a careful gathering of evidence. 

Psychotherapy is often an exercise in acquiring the competence to sit still and experiment with thought and emotional response.  Empathy is a major aspect of making it safe enough to sit still and practice confronting what might otherwise be unthinkable or intolerable. Patience and practice are required. This is the love in the work.

Significance.  Significance is what a person is also doing by doing an act in question. It is, so to speak, what they are up to. Behavior is organized by its significance and implemented by the particular practices a person engages in. 

Empathically, I am aware that what a person’s behavior signifies to me may be different from what it means to them.  I also keep in mind that they may not appreciate what I see as the significance of their behavior, regardless of how compelling the evidence. I don’t have a pipeline to the truth.  I to Thou involves being clear that mystery and uncertainty remains.

In appreciating and acknowledging the significance of an action, especially when that acknowledgment involves interpretation, all the dilemmas of attempting to make the unconscious conscious, all of the problems of attempting to get someone in touch with what they are reluctant to see, come into play.  Therapeutically, confronting someone while they are defensive requires tact.  Tact requires empathy; it requires an empathic appreciation that a person at any given time can tolerate only so much. People have to cope with how they are seen and this comes into play during psychotherapy. Being seen in ways that a person might be reluctant to acknowledge is akin to the vulnerability that attends intimacy.  One’s lovers, close friends, and therapists may be given permission to test the boundaries of self-understanding, but even when insight comes from a person’s closest confidants, it still might be intolerable.

Here's a story that I tell my students.

A baseball player, a pitcher, regularly throws a fastball high inside at ninety-five miles an hour. He mixes this up with a nasty curveball and is known for the occasional wild pitch.  He has hit more than one batter in the helmet. Those that know him outside the game have seen him tease his wife and children beyond what makes his audience comfortable.  This teasing clearly upsets his children. He doesn’t seem to notice their unhappiness. With his wife and kids, he thinks he is just being playful. You might think he is sadistic and mean and enjoys making people uncomfortable and helpless.  This is why his preferred pitch to a batter he has previously hit is to throw fast, high and very inside.

He had a severe and strict moralistic upbringing and now looks at himself from a perspective of moral superiority. Guilt is very hard for him to acknowledge or bear. It is reasonable to assume that he’d feel guilty and ashamed if he knew how he looks but defensively he is not going to see himself in that light. 

Instead, he sees himself as a talented pitcher with a clear appreciation of the strike zone and of the pitches hardest for his opponent to hit.  He views himself as a tough-minded sportsman, hypercompetitive but fair, and accepts only that the significance of his pitches is to strike out the batter, end the inning and win the game.  If he was asked if these pitches are also how he’ll get his contract renewed, feel the admiration of the crowd, and live the life of the ball player, he could probably acknowledge all of that.  But beyond what he can acknowledge about the significance of his pitches, he may also use his style of throw to achieve some sort of sadistic pleasure. It could be that the way he felt helpless and punished as a child is being worked out unconsciously in his manner of play both on the field and off.  He cuts that high inside corner on the wrong side more often than his consummate skill should allow.  His satisfaction at making the batter wince is too much for him to resist.  Since he is unaware of his sadism, he doesn’t control it well. In looking over his life a through-line of sadism emerges implemented by his treatment of family and opposing players. An empathic interpretation of his sadism would require considerable tact and care. It would be resisted. 

Identity. Every action is someone’s action and that someone has a name and a title or some sort of individual status marker.  The Identity parameter specifies that. A person’s name or title used out loud or silently in social interaction is a significant status marker and may frame how one person appreciates the context and meaning of the other’s action. Addressing or responding to someone by their nickname has different implications than responding to them as Professor or Doctor or Ms. or boy or "hey you".

How a person feels understood, and what they will tolerate from another’s representation of them may significantly reflect the names that are used. Empathy involves being held in mind in a fashion that may be reflected in the means of address. And, of course, people have various responses to their names being forgotten and may experience such a forgetting as a breach in empathy.

Personal Characteristics.  People’s behaviors are an expression of their personal characteristics as they show their colors, true or otherwise.  People vary in their Powers and Dispositions. A person’s behavior in their world follows from their psychological state and status, their values, knowledge and skills, and their traits, attitudes, interests and styles. 

People may want their actions judged as “in character” or not. Problematic or laudable behavior labeled as “out of character” does not create the conditions for degradation or accreditation that these same actions do if they are recognized as “in character” (Ossorio, 2005; Schwartz, 1979).  We offer praise or give people breaks in ways that depend on this distinction.  It gives them and us wiggle room.

Performance and Achievement.  A performance is an episode of behavior in real time with a beginning and an end. It can be interrupted and it achieves some difference.  

We do not directly observe what a person wants, knows, and knows how to do in the sense of being inside their head; instead, we observe their performance. We watch and participate in their social practices. But whatever their behavioral performance, if it is an aspect of an Intentional Action, it achieves some difference in the world, be it trivial or profound.

Behavior as "Intentional Action" is one of the basic interdependent components of the more general "Person Concept". The others are Individual Person, Language, World and Community. Some of this has been discussed in these writing and the rest will follow.  A full formulation can be found in Peter Ossorio's The Behavior of Persons.

Earlier, I posted on a method for regaining empathy and the problem of finding a common understanding of empathy.

Adapted from my “The Parameters of Empathy:  Core Considerations for Psychotherapy and Supervision”, The Advances in Descriptive Psychology, Vol. 10, 2013. 

Thanks to Joe Jeffrey for his powerpoint adapted here "Intentional and Deliberate Action".

This posting is an introduction to Descriptive Psychology. I have posted another more elaborate introduction:  A Short Course In Descriptive Psychology.

           

The Boston Descriptive Psychology Study Group has a FACEBOOK  site that contains a repository of basic Descriptive Psychology resources and current articles of interest. You are invited to join in. 

Sex and a Person's True Colors

We have all been witness to the degrading spectacle of a celebrity or politician apologizing for a sexual transgression, promising it will never happen again, and then it does. We laugh and ridicule but may privately think, "There but for the grace of God, go I". Or we witness the denial of a sexual violation that appears to have been repeated with apparent impunity.

Problematic sexual behavior is particularly difficult for some to renounce or control, but this can be said for many of our “appetites”. When these appetites become troubles and narrow a person’s world sufficiently we call it an addiction. How can we renounce or ignore what is part of our nature? 

We wouldn’t have much country music without our proclivity to repeat mistakes, to return to the same bad relationship or repeatedly find love in all the wrong places.  Opera would have lost half its repertoire. The Greeks would be known only for their comedies.

Why do we sometimes act in such a self-defeating manner? Psychoanalysis has theoretical explanations, a “return of the repressed”, a “return to the bad object” and the “repetition compulsion”.  Freud took libidinal desire as a need to be expressed, tamed, displaced or sublimated. But come hell or high water, sexual desire is a fundamental feature of life. It will have its say.

Once a pattern of arousal has been established, it is almost impossible to extinguish. Like it or not, what turns us on, turns us on.

Freud, and nearly everyone else, points out that visceral pleasure is a fundamental organizer of behavior. If it feels good, a person has a reason to do it.  But sometimes we have reason not to express it, since prudent, aesthetic and ethical reasons also count. How we weigh these motives is a significant personal characteristic. No matter how intense the want or desire, we may have stronger reasons to do something else. This is central to civil life (and some of its discontents).

Unless behavior is coerced, misconceived, or accidental, it is intentional and expresses something a person wants to do. “I can’t help myself” is equivalent to, "I do not have sufficient reasons to override what I am doing".

A maxim and a reminder: If a person recognizes an opportunity to do something he wants, he has reason to do it unless he has a stronger reason not to. 

Here is a Descriptive Psychological formula that reflects the relationship between opportunity, motive and behavior.

The Relationship Formula

IF:

“X” has a given relationship “R” to “P”

THEN: 

The behavior of “X” in respect to “P” will express “R”

UNLESS: 

1) “X” doesn’t recognize the relationship for what it is.

2) “X” is acting on another relationship that takes priority.

3) “X” is unable to act in ways that express that relationship.

4) “X” mistakenly believes his behavior reflected that relationship.

5) “X” miscalculates or the behavior miscarries.

Sexual desire is both a want and a need.  Its needful aspect may be forceful, driven. Sexual arousal is insistent, preoccupying.  It carries a motivational weight akin to hunger. Some people are hungrier than others. Some people find their hungers overwhelming. Obviously. This is why a promise to contain or stop is hard to keep.  

Renunciation or better self-control is even more difficult if other non hedonic core perspectives are underdeveloped, undervalued or less available. If ethics and aesthetics don’t count for much, if prudential self-protection is overridden by unrealistic self-regard and entitlement, they may not provide sufficient counterweight.  

A person’s life has patterns defined by what they actually find compelling and significant that may not be what they claim as their "true colors".  These patterns establish some of the dramatic through-lines that characterize an individual.  Some significant motives, conscious or unconscious, acknowledged or not, are implemented in spite a person claiming they are out of character. Although the community might hope that people know what they are up to, some unfortunate souls only recognize themselves after the damage has been done.  Even then, they might not recognize themselves. Or they do know, but their ideology, religion, or politics make them reluctant to honestly self-examine and confront what they need to know about themselves. The under-examined is difficult to socialize and control. 

In a curious essay, Freud asked whether people should take responsibility for their dreams. In spite of seeing dreams as mostly non deliberate mental activity, he answered yes.  It would be negligent not to, he thought. If the dreamer doesn’t hold himself responsible for his dreams, his neighbors will. By this Freud meant that to the extent dreams reveal a person’s significant dilemmas and concerns, they also show something about a person's character and potential actions. The dream is a second opinion of sorts, unclearly pointing to what the dreamer is consciously and unconsciously considering. The moral point of Freud's psychoanalytic treatment was to examine people’s under examined qualities, qualities otherwise unavailable for deliberation. If you don’t know what you are doing, it is very difficult to do something else instead.

The unexamined or denied is hard to self-manage. Being hidden from view is not the same as being gone. It's more like lurking.

Consciously or unconsciously, some may select a religious or social role in the hope that self-control will follow. It often doesn't.

People may join the priesthood or align with a political ideology hoping that their problematic desires will be kept in check. But that outcome is only likely if there is sufficient self-understanding, a lack of opportunity to act out, and the balance of stronger intrinsic values.

Promises are kept or not. If there is an underdeveloped or insufficient prudent, aesthetic or ethical perspective, a pattern of wanton disregard, arrogance and sexuality may have no adequate counter-balance, promises aside. 

Plato told him....



Some of these themes are explored in the posting, Confusions and Uncertainty in Sexual Feeling and Identity. And in the posting, Transgression, Denial, and Keeping Two Sets of Books.

 An object lesson: The Wreckage of Anthony Weiner




    

The Judgment Diagram is the format for understanding how a person weighs his or her circumstances, forms an appraisal (with or without deliberation), and acts accordingly. A person's "true colors" are revealed by the weights they give their various reasons to act one way or another. This diagram serves as the basis for the Psychodynamic Judgment Diagram where unconscious and under-examined motives are included in the judgment.

Dementia, Through-Lines and the Diminished Person

Recently, The Boston Descriptive Psychology Study Group spent an afternoon discussing the effects of dementia. We applied the paradigm case formulation of persons described in "What is a Person? How can we be sure?"  Our starting point was the effect dementia has on the ability to engage in Deliberate Action.  

Deliberate action requires the ability to choose or select a course of action among alternative ways of reaching a goal. This is more relevant for some motivational perspectives than others and is a central feature of action guided by ethical or aesthetic perspectives.  These motivational categories intrinsically require the possibility of renouncing an option.  I am going to take the “high road”, not the “low road”. Choice may be less essential when behavior is guided by hedonic or prudential concerns. I keep doing it because it feels good.   That’s scorching hot. I’m not going to touch it.

We wondered what happens when patterns of behavior are no longer as informed by a code of ethics and aesthetics as they would be if the person was better able to deliberate. What happens if we remove a significant degree of ethics and aesthetics from the human equation?  

As a person, I have the job of actor, observer and critic.  As an actor, I am the author of my behavior. As an observer, I note what is happening.  As a critic, I evaluate how I’m doing, and if it isn’t to my satisfaction, I attempt to change course. Observer and critic functions are hobbled in dementia. Self-regulation suffers. 

A paradigm case person is an adult with all the powers and dispositions to successfully act in the relevant communities of his or her culture.  The actual pattern of a person’s life has the qualities of a story or narrative. This is called a Dramaturgical Pattern in Descriptive Psychology.  All the world’s a stage. 

Dramaturgical patterns are partly organized by ongoing activity that the actor finds significant and that observer-critics will identify as “in character”.  This is a pattern of "through-lines" that corresponds to what a person is up to when they perform various social practices that may resemble each other only in their significance. For example, a person’s life might be identified by consistent attempts to act with modesty, tact and compassion. This could result in a deferential pattern of being overly careful to be fair, expressed as "others come first".  A mild mannered politeness might become the style of performance.  What happens if such a person suffers dementia?

If dementia interferes with the quality of deliberation, it impedes judgments that require the ability to choose among alternatives. A demented state might disrupt significant practices that would have been influenced by a person’s ethical and aesthetic perspectives of fairness and manners.  Of course, deliberate actions that concern a person's hedonic and prudent perspectives would also suffer, but ethical and aesthetic judgment is more vulnerable. To the extent that an ethical and aesthetic appreciation of a social practice's significance is not adequately present, we could expect hedonic and prudent behaviors to be less regulated. It would be unsurprising for behavior to become more pleasure-seeking, impulsively sexual, overly hostile, competitive or unduly concerned with safety.


A diminished aesthetic perspective can create other fundamental disruptions in a person's status. The loss of an adequate aesthetic perspective corresponds to a loss of concern with the question of what is fitting or not fitting given the sort of person I am. Self-maintenance, concerns with personal integrity, and self-status assignments falter as appraisals of self and world are made with less reference to what fits.


Consider different end of life dramas.  With “death as an advisor”, the knowledge of nearing the end of one's days may carry profound reason to approach the time remaining with a heightened ethical and aesthetic resolve. To the extent a person remains able to engage in deliberate action, the full use of hedonic, prudent, ethical and aesthetic judgment potentially fosters a more dignified ending than what dementia ordains. 

A dynamic wrinkle:  aesthetic judgment involves a range of social, intellectual and artistic values of truth, rigor, objectivity, closure, beauty, elegance and fit. Ethics concerns fairness, justice, the “level playing field”, the Golden Rule and similar notions. The competence needed to maintain the ability to successful employ these perspectives, i.e., the ability to engage in Deliberate Action, probably changes in different ways given different degrees of proficiency, value and locations of damage. Change in any area would result in a dynamic change across a variety of actions dependent on the contingent or independent nature of the domains affected.  All of this will be compounded by the memory disruptions and other loses of competence, also hallmarks of dementia. 


One consequence of a diminished capacity for deliberate action is a diminished empathy with a corresponding failure to appreciate what other people can tolerate. Having less perspective, understanding is limited. Behavior is not well tailored to what the other will feel.

A person whose life had a through-line of mindfully polite, compassionate action, who always practiced deference and tact, in a state of diminished capacity may now behave without accurate caring regard.

But does dementia allow a person’s “true colors” to finally appear? Probably no more than the nastiness that can come out in rage. This un-nuanced expression of frustration shows what would not have been expressed before. It is not necessarily a glimpse at something basic and true that was always hidden. Instead, ordinary human ambivalence is no longer competently managed by the kindness and compassion that counted for more.

Complex interdependent and intimate relationships invariably carry a degree of ambivalence. Emotionally competent adults learn to express this carefully. In the absence of a robust capacity to engage in Deliberate Action, ambivalence can devolve into an oscillation of love and hate, of poorly modulated idealization and devaluation. This is not a person's "true colors" but only a black and white shadow of what was there before. 

                    Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
                    nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.  Catullus

4/26/15
Some thoughts that followed reading in the NY Times, Sex, Dementia and a Husband on Trial at Age 78:

Intimate love is wonderful.  Loving is first person actor's knowledge, fundamental to how an intimate relationship is recognized. I can forget your name and our social and kinship connection and still know, without doubt, who you are to me. It's how I feel when I am near you. 

With love of a certain sort, empathy and intimacy define a through-line of relatedness. We seek the comfort, perhaps the excitement, of each other's presence, appreciating the significance of each other's intentions and trusting that our vulnerability is welcome and safe. This is heart felt knowing. It holds on. 

8/21/15
An empirical vindication?: Your Brain, Your Disease, Your Self

What Are the Conceptual Problems in Psychology and Psychoanalysis?

"The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a young science....For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion....
The existence of experimental methods make us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and methods pass one another by." Ludwig Wittgenstein


The Boston Descriptive Psychology Study Group wants to work on conceptual problems in Psychology, Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis for fall projects. Can you help identify some issues for us?  We meet as a bi weekly tutorial and discussion group. We try to build non theoretical platforms that can be used to compare theories and to translate concepts into practice. We make use of Descriptive Psychology in sorting out the formal or logical structure of our subject matter. An example of this can be found in the entry on Empathy and the Problem of Definition.  If you'd like to know "What is Descriptive Psychology?"  click the link.

Please visit our FACEBOOK site for a collection of basic resources and discussion.

Ordinary Empathy

"A person's behavior goes right, if it doesn't go wrong in one of the ways it can go wrong." Peter Ossorio, Place, 1998. 


Behavior going right requires no explanation.  Successful behavior is ordinary. Empathy is ordinary in the same way.

Empathy is a fundamental feature of emotional competence.  In the average expected, good enough maturation, people naturally acquire empathic skills as they interact with others, but some circumstances and manners of parenting are more conducive to fostering empathy than others. 

We don't always need to be empathic, but when a situation calls for mutual understanding, a lack of empathy requires explanation. Under normal circumstances, people make sense to each other, and when they don't, we expect people to be able to figure out why. 

Without the right degree of empathy, ordinary social interaction would be hard.  Negotiation would be difficult.  Moral discourse would be impossible.  Improvisational play would be stilted, at best.

Empathic skill is a standing condition of normal personality, a competence required for engaging in social practices if those practices are to have the character of “flow”, attunement, harmony, or the dance-like features of improvisational play.  Intimacy requires empathy.  Love, work and play are based on this shared competence.

When there isn't sufficient empathic skill there's pathology.   Such deficits interfere with the ability to engage in certain vital relationships, especially where compassion and intimacy are required.

Empathy is the core of our intimate acts. Intimacy is understood as empathy plus a willingness to share vulnerability. In an intimate act, we let someone else see our most vulnerable features. Intimacy involves the risk and the hope that our vulnerability will be treated carefully and kindly.

Empathic skill employed in the service of sadism, hostility, or coercive manipulation is a miscarriage of empathy, an exploitation of the accurate recognition of another person. It is not empathy when the goal of the understanding is exploitation or harm. This is something else entirely.

Two "operational" definitions:  1.  We experience someone as empathic when they demonstrate that they appreciate our intentions and the significance of our actions in a manner that respects our toleration for being known.  2.  Empathic action requires an appreciation of what a person intends through recognizing their reasons for action, what they know about their relevant circumstances, what skill or competence they have relevant to what they are trying to do, and the significance of this performance to them. Empathic action involves acknowledging this without anyone feeling overwhelmed or violated.

The second definition provides a parametric analysis of empathy, an operational definition and a serviceable tool for empathy training, psychotherapy, and supervision.   The parameters that the empathic actor attends implicitly or mindfully are the other’s reasons for action (Wants), their knowledge of their circumstances (Knows), their self recognized skills to achieve what they want in the relevant circumstances (Knows How), and the significance of success or failure in accomplishing the desired outcome (Significance).  The empathic actor implicitly or mindfully recognizes the specific content of these parameters and is careful to express this understanding in a  way that can be tolerated. In situations that result in empathic failure, reflection on these parameters can usefully serve attempts to regain an empathic connection. These parameters can provide a set of questions for establishing or regaining empathy. 

A claim: This formulation can be a map for any empathic practice.  It provides a method for a systematic and comparative analysis across ages, cultures, and species. 


A set of questions to ask yourself:

1.  Given their knowledge of the overall current circumstances, what does this person want and value?  (And do we share an understanding of what the overall circumstance calls for?)

2. What exactly do they recognize in their circumstance relevant to what they want or value? (And do we share a common appreciation of the relevant circumstances?)

3. What do they know how to do, what skills do they possess, given what they see as their current opportunity or dilemma? (And are they aware of having the needed competencies).

4. What is the significance to them of how they behave in these circumstances?

5. What personal characteristics of theirs are involved or expressed?

6. Can they tolerate the way I express what I understand about them?
   

This is a further elaboration of Empathy and the Problem of Definition.  The methods of paradigm case formulation and parametric analysis are described there.  See also Intentional Action, Empathy and Psychotherapy.

Special thanks to Pam Evans and CJ Stone for offering far better ways to say what I had expressed awkwardly. 

The Problem of Other Possible Persons

It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means:  “they do not think, and that is why they do not talk.” But---they simply do not talk.   Wittgenstein

(and if they can, they do not talk to us)

Should we enjoy the tricks a slave performs for her master? 

Years back, I was pursuing a pod of bottlenose dolphin when a small one smacked the stern of my kayak, hard.  As the calf re-approached, a large female nudged it away. I was astonished, relieved and grateful. Not wanting to push my luck, I paddled back to shore.

I read today that the Indian government declared dolphins and other cetaceans "non-human persons" that have specific rights including freedom from capture. They are not objects for purposes of entertainment. They are not chattel.  

There might not be sufficient evidence to grant the status of “person” to dolphins,  judges differ, but it is the right thing to do. 

The concept of nonhuman persons has a role in the beginning of Descriptive Psychology. Sometime in the early 1960's, Peter Ossorio was asked by NASA, “If green gas on the moon speaks to one of our astronauts, how do we know whether or not it is a person?” The answer, of course, depends on what we mean by “person”. This question also separates the status of being a person from the person's embodiment. This needs to be held in mind since it is a factor in our willingness to consider something as one of us. Empathy may become more difficult as the embodiment of the other differs from our own.  This is not a trivial matter. Historically, based on body, gender, skin color and age, some of us have had our personhood denied.  

Whether there are non-human persons is a serious question with significant moral and ethical implications.  It matters where we draw the line.  Denying personhood has legitimized horrors.  If the Cetacea are persons, we are currently committing genocide against them. If nonhuman primates, cetaceans and others are persons, there are legitimate questions about the state of their civil rights.  

It is an empirical question whether any nonhuman entities are actually persons, but it is a moral and ethical question how certain we need to be.  It matters to what extent we think of them as us. Animals are all more or less us.  How could they not be? 

Here are some conceptual tools that can help sort this out.  

A Paradigm Case of Persons

When I say animals are all more or less us, I have in mind a paradigm of what we agree is a person. Some animals share most of our key features, some less. The use of a Paradigm Case Method helps identify where the ground is common and where it may be lacking. It allows different judges to clearly find where they agree and disagree. 

The Paradigm Case approach to persons developed in Descriptive Psychology involves the four interrelated concepts of 1) The Individual Person, 2) Deliberate Action, 3) Reality and the Real or Historical World, and 4) Language or Verbal Behavior.  All four concepts require full articulation for any one of them to be fully intelligible, but for my purposes I will focus on the first two. Although language is a central feature of the person concept, I am only going to mention its use in the detection of possible persons. 

A Person is an individual whose history is, paradigmatically, a history of Deliberate Action in a Dramaturgical Pattern.  Deliberate Action is a form of behavior in which a person (a) engages in an Intentional Action, (b) is cognizant of that, and (c) has chosen to do that.  A person is not always engaged in a deliberate action but has the eligibility to do so.  A human being is an individual who is both a person and a specimen of Homo sapiens. (P. G. Ossorio, The Behavior of Persons, 2013).

Since persons are deliberate actors, they also employ hedonic, prudent, aesthetic and ethical reasons when selecting, choosing or deciding on a course of action. As part of our "social contract" we expect that the normal person can make use of all four of these motivational perspectives. Individual persons will weigh these motives in a manner that reflects their personal characteristics.  

That life is lived in a “dramaturgical” pattern is to say that people make sense, their stories can be intelligibly told. Life consists of episodes of unfolding social practices. Actions have an ongoing significance creating through-lines that an observer can employ in recognizing both in and out of character behavior. 

The paradigm case allows for nonhuman persons, potential persons, nascent persons, manufactured persons, former persons, "deficit case" persons, and "primitive" persons. (I am not going to dignify the political claim that corporations are persons.)  Some of these categories carry serious ethical and legal weight. For example, because of the category of potential persons, abortion is not simply a medical issue.  Important ethical, moral and legal consequences apply to persons that are inappropriate when applied to non-persons.  I can kill a nonperson but if I take the life of a person, that act might be murder. 

Verbal behavior is of particular value in detecting nonhuman persons since language facilitates the representation not only of the behavior enacted but the alternative action not performed. The ability to represent an action not taken is a good way of building the case that Deliberate Action has occurred since choosing and refraining go hand in hand. A basic way of providing good evidence of personhood is when the candidate in question can symbolically represent what he didn't do. 

Are dolphins good candidates for personhood?  Do they engage in deliberate action in a dramaturgical pattern? Did a dolphin protect me from mischief? Do bottlenose dolphins speak to each other?  I don't know.  I don't have sufficient evidence that dolphins fill the paradigm case but I have good reason to think they might. By using a Paradigm Case Formulation, I can point to where the evidence is robust and where it is lacking. Language seems to be the sticking point. When Wittgenstein said, "if the lion could talk, we would not understand him," he was reminding us that translation requires shared social practices. We may share more with dolphins than meets the eye. 

So what should we do with our uncertainty? Logically, we are never in a position to prove that something is a person but we can adopt a policy that if we have any grounds for seeing the other as one of us we should treat that entity as a person until we have reason enough to feel we are misguided. With persons it should always be I to Thou. There are people whose cultures and social practices leave me mystified, but it is prudent and ethical to proceed from the belief that I simply don't understand what they are about. I suspect the same holds for the other animals I know.

I am not particularly concerned about initial false positives.  In my scientific training, I was told to avoid anthropomorphism.  I have become skeptical about the morality of this stance.


You might consider signing: http://www.cetaceanrights.org

This topic is examined further in "Personhood Beyond the Human: A Paradigm Case Formulation of Persons."
Personhood Beyond the Human will be explored at a conference at Yale University,  December 6-8, 2013. 

A more extensive unfolding of these issues can be found in a earlier work of mine, “The Problem of Other Possible Persons: Dolphins, Primates and Aliens”, in Davis & Mitchell (eds.),  Advances in Descriptive Psychology, volume 2, 1982. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Ossorio's The Behavior of Persons with an updated index can be obtained from The Descriptive Psychology Press

If you are interested in "What is Descriptive Psychology?" you might click the link for Clarke Stone's answer.

The Boston Descriptive Psychology Study Group has started a FACEBOOK  site that contains a repository of basic Descriptive Psychology resources and is place for discussion. You are invited to join in. 

Empathy and the Problem of Definition

In the behavioral sciences it is often very difficult to know if we are on the same page. This confusion plagues many of our discussions. How do we define our terms? How do we manage useful disagreement? Are we even talking about the same thing? These issues surfaced immediately at The Helix Center's roundtable on empathy and altruism. We have varied and different commitments when we use these concepts.


A video stream of the conversation can be found here:
Empathy and Altruism
          
So what can be done? In Descriptive Psychology, Paradigm Case Formulation and Parametric Analysis are tools used when ordinary definitions prove too exclusive or inclusive or lead to unmanageable disagreement. I think the Paradigm-Case Method in legal work serves a similar function. 
  

I am going to sort some of this out regarding empathy.  This will require an excursion into intentionality and intentional action. I can't directly see through your eyes, but I can see what you do. I don't have direct access to your thoughts and feelings but I can observe and participate in your actions and practices.

Empathy, Intentional Action, Paradigm Case Formulation and Parametric Analysis

Paradigm Case Formulations are employed when it is desirable to achieve a common understanding of a subject matter but where definitions prove too limiting, various, ambiguous or impossible. Empathy poses this definitional problem. Finding an inclusive definition is a common conceptual dilemma. Consider how difficult it is to exactly define what is meant by the word “family” or the word “chair” if we wish to achieve agreement on all examples of possible “families” and “chairs”.  Must all families have two parents of different genders plus their children?  Must all chairs have four legs and a backrest?  A Paradigm Case Formulation should provide all competent users a conceptualization that can serve as a starting point of agreement.  Generally it should consist of the most complex case, an indubitable case, or a primary or archetypal case.  It should be a sort of “By God, if there were ever a case of “X”, then that’s it.”  For example, most would agree that a group of people living together, consisting of a married father and mother, and their biological son and daughter would be a family. But what if there is only a husband, his husband, and their dog? Or, three best friends who live under one roof and make their significant decisions together? What elements must be present and what can we change, add or leave out and still meet what different people would call a family?

By starting with a paradigm case that everyone easily identifies as within their understanding of a concept, it becomes possible to delete or change features of the paradigm with the consequence that with each change some people may no longer agree that they are still talking about the same thing. But because of the shared paradigm, they can show where there is disagreement.

A Parametric Analysis, on the other hand, attempts to clarify how one example of the subject matter can be the same or different from all other examples. Each parameter should identify a necessary and independent dimension of the concept.  For example, all figures in plane geometry are the same or different depending on their varied location on the parameters of the ordinate and the abscissa. All colors are the same or different depending on how they vary on the parameters of hue, saturation and brightness.

What about empathy? Empathy is variously understood to involve an appreciation of being in another person’s position, an appreciation that is both accurate and attuned to the other’s current predicament and state of awareness, a sort of “feeling into” the other, a knowing of their perspective.  Empathy is often connected to an altruistic or sympathetic stance and is a feature of the “I-Thou” relationship.  It tends to be respectful and kind.

But seeing from another’s perspective is a useful reminder and a fiction.  I can only walk in my shoes and see from my perspective.  What I have available are my observations and thoughts regarding my interactions with other people.  I
observe other people’s actions but I do so from where I stand.  There is no way around this fact. Since we cannot get inside another’s head, our sense that the other is being empathic will follow, correctly or not, from whether we experience the other as understanding the significance of our activity.

As a psychotherapist and supervisor of psychotherapy, I believe that empathy is a defining feature of effective treatment. In my training, the three most influential theorists of empathy were probably Carl Rogers, Heinz Kohut, and Roy Schafer. These authors offer a similar vision of the therapist’s empathic activity, and of the effect empathy has on the client.  Schafer will further describe empathy as both a psychological state and as an action, a position I find particularly useful in building a tool for empathic inquiry. All three authors will provide a starting point for my conceptualization.

Carl Rogers makes the following points about empathy. It involves “entering the private perceptual world of the other”, “being sensitive, moment to moment, to the changing felt meaning which flow in this other person”, assuming a nonjudgmental stance, and being careful not to uncover meaning that the other would find threatening.  

Heinz Kohut describes empathy as “the capacity to think and feel oneself into the life of the another person” and as “vicarious introspection”.  Kohut also underscores that appropriate and therapeutic empathy is “attenuated empathy”, a diminished response that is not overwhelming to either party and protects both from becoming too defensive or “walled off”. 

Roy Schafer describes empathy as sharing and comprehending the momentary psychological state of another person. For Schafer, empathy is a central feature of the analyst’s attitude from which the analyst constructs a mental model of the analysand, and expresses this understanding with care not to “mortify” the client. All three authors represent empathy as an understanding that is accurate, attuned to the present interaction, and tolerable to both people.

   A Paradigm Case Formulation of Empathic Action

My formulation:

Empathic action communicates an accurate understanding of the significance of another person’s intentional actions in a way they can tolerate being recognized. This requires understanding a person’s currently active motivations, knowledge, and skills and how they view the significance of their actions in the current circumstance.  As a Paradigm Case Formulation, I take it that what I have described is recognizable as empathy and that the formulation allows for alterations that will become more or less recognizable within the ordinary shared meaning of the concept. For example, although I have described this as a two-person interaction, the number of participants can be increased. The accuracy of the understanding can be shared by all or just assumed by one party (“I’m being empathic even if you don’t realize it.”).

Motivation, knowledge, skill and significance are parameters of a person's understanding of intentional behavior.   The content of these parameters can be more or less accurate and certain and this is why empathy has a “more or less” quality. Some people we clearly understand and some people we just sort of understand. 

Since the content of each of the parameters may be more or less deficient and may change over time, a person may judge that someone is not or no longer empathic, and this may lead to disagreement, but the parameters of the formulation should allow observers to know where they agree and where they differ. 

My goal is to be systematic about the dimensions or parameters of empathy and to develop a set of questions and reminders that can be used in an interview or in self-reflection. 

The parametric analysis of intentional action developed by Peter Ossorio provides the dimensions for my conceptualization of empathy. Ossorio presents intentional action as the most inclusive concept of behavior that includes the behavior of humans and other animals. The general case of intentional action allows for various forms of deliberate and non-deliberate intentional action as well as intentional action performed consciously, pre-consciously, or unconsciously. In deliberate action, the actor attempts to choose among options relevant to reaching a goal, whereas in non-deliberate intentional action only the recognition of a goal matters independent of whether the actor sees alternative ways of reaching the goal. Impulsive emotional action may be merely intentional, whereas the recognition of choice and alternative typify deliberate action. The guiding notion is that intentional activity involves a purposeful and meaningful attempt to accomplish something. This is in contrast to apparent behaviors that are accidents, matters of reflex, or completely forced or coerced. For the most part, when speaking about the behavior of persons, we mean some form of intentional action, even though the paradigm case of the behavior of persons will be deliberate action.  Persons are sometimes but not always deliberate actors.  But the eligibility to be a deliberate actor is a fundamental aspect of the full concept of “Person”.  

Here's a parametric analysis of behavior that identifies the dimensions one behavior can be the same or different from another behavior.

    Behavior = Intentional Action = < I, W, K, KH, P, A, S, PC >

I: The Identity of the actor.

W:  What the actor Wants to accomplish.

K:  What the actor Knows, distinguishes, or recognizes in the circumstance that are relevant to what the actor Wants. (In Deliberate Action the actor recognizes different options, in Cognizant Action the actor is self aware of the ongoing behavior).

KH:  What the actor Knows-How to do given what the actor Wants and Knows about the relevant circumstance.

P:  The procedural manner or Performance of the action in real time.

A:  The Achievement of the action.

S:  The Significance of the action for the actor.

PC:  The Personal Characteristics of the actor expressed by the action.                                                                                      

These parameters roughly correspond to the content of Schafer’s “mental model” and are implicit in people’s basic understanding of each other.  We implicitly understand each other as having specific motives, knowledge, and skills. We also see people’s behavior as a manifestation of their particular personal characteristics, and we expect that people can appraise the significance of their actions and the actions of others.

To the extent that these parameters cover the full range of purposeful behavior, they should also cover the distinctions relevant to empathy. The parameters can also serve as a guide or checklist when I am uncertain about my empathy toward another person. I find the following questions to be useful reminders. I might ask or wonder:

1. Given their understanding of the overall circumstances, what does this person want and value? (And do we share an understanding of what the overall circumstance call for? ) (The "W" parameter)

2.  What exactly do they recognize in their circumstance that is relevant to what they want and value? (And do we share a common appreciation of this situation?) (The "K" parameter)

3. What do they know how to do given what they see as their current opportunity or dilemma? (And do they have the skill or competence that is needed to successfully manage the circumstance?) (The "KH" parameter)

4. What is the significance to them of how they behave in this circumstance? (The "S" parameter)

5. What personal characteristics are they employing and what is the significance of these characteristics to them? (The "PC" and "S" parameters)

6. I should also wonder how they will appreciate and tolerate my understanding.

Adapted from my “The Parameters of Empathy:  Core Considerations for Psychotherapy and Supervision”, The Advances in Descriptive Psychology, Vol. 10, 2013.

This entry is again taken up in Intentional Action, Empathy and Psychotherapy.

A fully formed discussion of Paradigm Case Formulations and Parametric Analysis is found in Peter Ossorio,  The Behavior of Persons 2013, Ann Arbor: Descriptive Psychology Press
For ordering information contact: The Descriptive Psychology Press

An online glossary of Descriptive Psychology concepts developed by Clarke Stone can be found here, Descriptive Psychology, One bite at a time.

The Boston Descriptive Psychology Study Group has a FACEBOOK  site that contains a repository of basic Descriptive Psychology resources and is place for discussion. Please,  join in.