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.

   

Emotional Competence, Self-Experience and Developmental Patterns

The parent's job is to facilitate their child's growth toward a "good enough" version of what is possible.

What is emotional competence? How is it developed? How does trauma and deprivation interfere?

I teach a course introducing psychodynamic theory to clinical psychology doctoral students, taught from the perspective of Descriptive Psychology. When we go over "The Essentials of Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice", I remind students of the historical shift in the theory's focus on what an infant or child needs to manage and tolerate. For the early Freudians, the central problem was the management and toleration of sexuality and aggression. For later theorists, attention shifted to the infant and child's ability to handle the complexity of dependent relationships with their ambiguities and ambivalences. These later theorists were also interested in the self that experienced these complex relationships and tensions. How are these feelings and relationships to be managed?

The development of any personal characteristic requires a prior capacity and an appropriate intervening history. Self-experience concerns feeling of continuity, coherence or fragmentation; a person's sense of authenticity and agency; and a host of related themes. The development of one's sense of self has patterns and through-lines with characteristic outcomes.  For children with ordinary or exceptional initial capacities, the nature of their parenting and circumstances, fortuitous or not, is relevant.  Self-experience and emotional maturation are interwoven themes. A person's toleration of affect and their expression of emotion go hand in hand. 

The chart below attempts a summary of major developmental achievements the good enough parent in the good enough environment fosters in the average expected child in contrast to what follows in the wake of deprivation and trauma. A person's developmental history fosters or elicits an ongoing pattern of life. I use this sort of language in an attempt to avoid implying causality, since there is no reason these patterns necessarily result in a specific outcome, but are understandable when they do. We are not surprised by the result even if it did not have to turn out as it did. This is not a deterministic model of development, but rather a Dramaturgical pattern that makes sense in retrospect. To paraphrase Adam Philip's summary of Freud's theory of development, childhood informs everything but predicts nothing. 

For methodological purposes, I am defining self-experience on an axis of "cohesion" and "fragmentation". I am not all that happy with the images implied by this language. But for now, I don't have better images or concepts available, and this language does have an established use in the Self Psychology and Object Relations literature. I welcome a better conceptualization.  By "cohesion", I am referring to the sense of a person having it together, feeling whole or comfortable in their skin. This is in contrast to a condition of "fragmentation", of falling apart, cracking up or not being able to keep it together.  I suspect you know what I mean. 

                                    Emotional Competence and Related Themes

        Cohesive                                                                           Fragmented 

  

Figure 5.1   Emotional Competence and Related Themes

Good enough parental attunement, empathy, holding, mirroring, reflexive function, containment.		Deprivation and trauma.
FOSTERS		ELICITS
Tolerable anxiety.		Panic
Toleration of conflict, uncertainty, and ambivalence.		Poor toleration of affect, conflict, uncertainty and ambivalence defended through repression, dissociative splitting, and projection
Secure attachments. Toleration of being alone.		Insecure attachments, abandonment fears
Accurate empathic appreciation of others. Capacity for I-Thou relations.		I-It relations and indifference.
circumstance and emotion
Provocation evokes anger more than:		Rage or inhibition
Danger evokes fear  more than:		Panic
Loss evokes loneliness and sadness...		Aloneness, emptiness, and depression.
One’s wrongdoing and transgression evoke guilt and reparation...		Debilitating shame, humiliation or attacks on the critical witness (self or other).
Others’ success evokes competition, assertion, or admiration...		Envy or jealously.
Others’ loss evokes sympathy...		Schadenfreude or gloating.

Some further elaboration and clarification:

Problematically obscured, if not articulated, is what we commit ourselves to when we talk about emotion. "Emotion" covers a lot of ground and is one of the most varied and conceptually muddled terms in psychology. (This, as Wittgenstein reminds us, is the condition of conceptual confusion that plagues psychology).  In the tradition of Descriptive Psychology, when I use emotion concepts, I refer to a family of intentional actions in which the actor has a learned tendency to immediately act on an appraisal without deliberation. Fear, anger, guilt, jealousy, envy, sadness and joy are paradigm examples. Sympathy, admiration, and many other relational stances bear a family resemblance to emotions although not everyone will agree they should be called emotions. But they do, more or less, share the quality of an immediate response to a recognized circumstance.

Mostly, we don't decide to feel emotional, we automatically respond to our appraisal of what we take our circumstances to be. When I recognize immediate danger, I act fearfully; when suddenly provoked, I act with hostility; and so on. "Unless clauses" are also central in clarifying emotional behavior since I will act with immediacy toward my circumstances unless I have a stronger reason not to. For example, I will act with hostility to provocation unless I see it as too dangerous to act, or ethically wrong, or I am unable to act at that time, or I am unable to see the provocation for what it is, and so on. This holds for all of our emotion terms coupled with the appropriate unless clause reminders.

Understanding emotional competence also hinges on the meaning of competence. Competence is a matter of effectiveness, something achieved by relevant practice and experience over time. Whereas knowledge or insight can be achieved in an instant, competence or know-how generally must be practiced under varied circumstances before it feels natural.

Certain patterns of emotional behavior are more apt to result in a successful outcome than others. Anger versus rage or fear versus panic are cases in point. Anger and fear may result in a highly specific and well targeted response, whereas rage and panic suggest a poorly modulated, flailing reaction. Similarly, some emotional behaviors are more likely to have pro-social than anti-social implications and will be valued accordingly. One's expression of sympathy or gloating in response to another's loss may result in different reactions from the community. 

Some other implications: 

1. Central aspects of emotional competence concern a person's accurate recognition of the emotionally appraised state of affairs, the ease of expressing the emotion, and the reversibility, closure, resolution, and termination of the emotional action.  Am I provoked by what is appropriately provocative? Am I able to tolerate being angry in response to what I see? Can I adequately adjust my behavior to a revised understanding of the circumstances? Can I let it go and get on to other business? Emotional behavior can be competent or incompetent. This reminder undermines the false distinction between rational behavior and emotional behavior. Neither its immediacy nor its absence of deliberation makes emotional behavior an irrational response to a person's circumstances. Emotional behavior is rational when it is an accurate and effective response. It is irrational when, like any other response, it follows from an inadequate or distorted appraisal of the relevant circumstances. 


Here's the logical form of emotional behavior as an intentional action:

W:  What the actor Wants to accomplish.
K:  What the actor Knows, distinguishes, or recognizes in the circumstance that is relevant to what the actor Wants.
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.

And an example that highlights the appraisal and competence needed to act effectively:

Notice it is the automatic and immediate tendency to escape the Zombie that gives us reason enough to label this as fear.

Hence the reality or cognitive basis of emotion:

Further,

2. A person's empathic skills are a crucial aspect of their ability to adequately appraise the actions of others and respond appropriately. 

3. A person’s ease or skill at emotional closure is a fundamental quality of emotional competence as is:  

5. The ease and accuracy of recognizing emotion in one's self and others.

6. Developmentally, the social experiences that foster the creation and development of the values, knowledge, and skills required for competent emotional behavior are those that provide adequate practice and experience in the effective and immediate response to danger, loss, provocation, wrongdoing, and so on.  The ability to act effectively and immediately is fundamental in demonstrating emotional competence.  The ability to refrain from emotional expression is equally salient. It is negligent to not pause and deliberate under certain circumstances and this is required of the competent person if they are to remain in good standing with others.

7.  Emotionally competent behavior effectively restores or enhances a person’s status or place in their world. Incompetent emotional behavior is ineffective at restoring or enhancing one's position.  

8. Emotionally competent actions are judged by the community's sense of the shelf life of reasonably enduring or putting up with a person’s emotional actions, traits, states, and moods.  The shelf life is the actual but varied duration it takes for others to decide that a person should have resolved their situation or reconciled with an incomplete or failed resolution.  Social norms and idiosyncratic values apply. A community has stated and unstated expectations for when its members need to "get over it, already". This can be complicated by the fact that a person is a member of a variety of communities not all of which will have the same standards. 

9. The classic psychoanalytic observer might notice that the axis of cohesion to fragmentation somewhat resembles the tradition of grouping issues as Oedipal to pre-Oedipal. About this, I remain silent. 




THIS BE THE VERSE

(but have kids and teach your children well.)