Degradation Ceremonies in Everyday Life

A person will not choose less behavior potential over more. Peter G. Ossorio

When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.  Bob Dylan

The Degradation Ceremonies of everyday life don’t look like ceremonies. Instead, they look like how we treat people as not one of us, how we deliberately or inadvertently assign the status that someone is not in good standing with what we believe we represent. 

Social interactions are framed by status assignments that address the place we have in each other's worlds.  Are you good enough, are you worthy of being one of us?  Am I?  

Harold Garfinkel

The ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel, writing about the sociology of moral indignation, described Degradation Ceremonies as rituals that remove people from a valued place and restrict their eligibility within a community.  Social practices that a person could previously perform are now limited or forbidden. After a successful Degradation Ceremony, the degraded person is not one of us. They fail to meet our standards.

What counts as a degradation ceremony?  How do they vary? Let's employ a Paradigm Case Formulation (PCF). PCFs provide a method for capturing a wide range of related content in situations where simple definitions might prove inadequate.  A PCF consists of a description that all competent judges would agree contains all the necessary elements that mark the case in question. The goal is to provide 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.”  When the complete paradigm of a degradation ceremony is performed, there's little doubt that the degraded has undergone restriction. When less than the full case is employed, the outcome is less clear. I think the less than full case informs everyday engagement. While moving though the day with a welcome greeting or a dismissive glance, we let each other know where we stand. Whether obvious, subtle, intended or not, our stances and actions can degrade or accredit those we encounter.  

The full PCF identifies the "official" degradation ceremony. Altering the paradigm helps us understand other more mundane degradations as well.  

Here's the full paradigm:

Notice that degradations are social practices that involve a community's shared values. To be one of us in a particular role carries the expectation that we value certain states of affairs in a similar way. As fathers, we value our children; as police, we respect and enforce the law; as friends, we trust and go out of our way to engage and play with our buddies; as Boy Scouts, we are trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. And so on.  We all have varied roles and are members of multiple communities. I have a friend who was once a scout and is now a father and a cop. 

Some roles comfortably coexist, and some do not. Conflict is more or less inevitable. Life is complicated this way. I may feel degraded in some roles but not others. 

We play our roles and demonstrate our values through our actions. We take it that true membership requires more than lip service to these values. We walk the talk. Whether or not our performance reflects our true colors, the choices we appear to make define what others see as our character. 

In any community there are people who are obviously the real McCoy, who serve as exemplars of what it takes to be in good standing. They are the ones most eligible to denounce transgression and to witness, acknowledge, or enforce the transgressor's removal from privilege. In the classic ceremony, they perform these roles in public. 

Here's the paradigmatic ceremony:

Garfinkel's full ceremony is deliberately done out loud and in public, but it can be accomplished quietly, discreetly, silently, ambiguously, or perhaps unconsciously. It can be unintentional or performed by mistake. Certainly, two people can do this to each other. 

Since the ceremony involves social roles, a person can play the different parts. People can play this out by themselves and to themselves. I can recognize my transgressions, my own moral failings, denounce myself, and restrict myself accordingly. I might not be good enough for myself regardless of how you see me.

Some Effects of Degradation:

The degraded are prone to anxiety and depression.  They have lost something significant; their world of valued action is now smaller.   This depression corresponds to lost eligibility, the loss in esteem that reflects the restricted ability to do what the community values.  An important role cannot be fully performed. The experience of satisfaction that comes with the successful accomplishment of a valued role cannot be achieved.   Sadness, shame, humiliation, regret, guilt, emptiness, resentment, and other kindred moods and emotions are part of the package. 

Anxiety attends the insecurity of inhabiting an unfortunate place in the social world. This insecurity follows from being seen as incompetent to maintain the values of the community along with the expectation of an absence of support when confronting tasks that only members in good standing are permitted. Members in good standing have each other's back and are expected to be competent players. The degraded no longer have that support or opportunity.

When the degraded find themselves in the company of members of the valued community they often exhibit signs of inferiority and rejection. Encounters become awkward.  The recognition of stiltedness intensifies whatever anxiety is present. Since the rhythm of gesture and speech that flows among peers is broken, engagement is skew. 

The degraded may develop a paranoid expectation of harsh judgment, making social contact even more awkward and defensive.  It is no wonder they end up lonely.

Anger, hostility and rage may also be present and serve as a move to negate the degradation. To the extent I have nothing, I may have nothing to lose. 

Threatened degradation elicits self-affirmation. Attacking the integrity of the denouncer or blinding the witness are reasonable responses to attempted degradation. Excuses that the so-called transgressive performance is misunderstood, not in character, or a result of mitigating or coercing forces are understandably attempted. It is not for you to say, and I had no choice, may counter the threat of being degraded. 

In the paradigm of the degradation ceremony the denouncer describes the act in value laden terms. Appropriation is theft, death is murder, an absence of assertive response is cowardice, and so on. The perpetrator has reason not only to disown the offending act but to re-describe it as something else. It is not what you are calling it. You don't know what you're talking about. You've got it wrong, that's not what I did. 

The Ceremony May Be Taken as The Natural Order of Things (Or As Already Happened).

Degradation can be taken for granted as the moral inferiority inherent in a community or as stigma passed down through generations. The chauvinisms of sexual orientation, physical appearance, gender, age, race, class, ethnicity, and the indoctrinations of virulent religion and nationalism convey status inherited and degraded. Children who see their parents as occupying an unfortunate social place may see themselves as "born to lose".  Or they may be seen as such, regardless of their merit. 
Community chauvinisms establish the additional barrier of some people being inherently ineligible to acquire full good standing. No matter what you do, you are never really one of us.

If people are born into an untouchable condition, a position of shame and degradation can seem the natural order of things with the choices people make reflecting this unjust status assignment. Rarely is the world a level playing field, but for some the rules are unfair from the get-go. 

Some people simply know their place. And some look around and say fuck you. If I start life degraded, maybe I'll rise up and rebel or perhaps I'll accept my degradation and make the best of it, whether you like it or not. I might find a community where I'm welcome while keeping in mind the degradations foisted on me by yours. I need a place where I belong. We both might suffer the consequences. 

What Is The Degraded Left To Do?

If the degradation is accepted by the community and perpetrator, the fundamental problem for the degraded is how to regain status or tolerate the status assigned. Since the paradigm case involves the claim that the transgressive acts were in character, one path for the perpetrator is to show the deplorable deeds were not in character or that the character of the perpetrator has changed. Since we generally hold that character is stable over time, this presents a fundamental barrier to regaining a favorable place. It will take time.  

It is also possible for the degraded to reassign the significance of what is valued. What was once desirable or transgressive no longer matters that way. This can look like sour grapes or gay pride.

One first step in regaining status is to show that the perpetrator's actions may have reflected a transgression of the community's values, but none the less, these values remain important to the perpetrator. Acknowledgments of guilt, through penance and restitution, accompanied by the acceptance of punishment are forms of action that may be required. Non-recidivism is key but may be difficult to demonstrate since the opportunity to continue in the valued role has been restricted. Time will tell. Different judges have different criteria for what passes as sufficient demonstration of dues paid and character changed. 

I've hardly mentioned the varied ways we degrade each other. We treat people as invisible, dismissible, of no consequence; as inferior, not worthy of attention, as sources to an end worth only our desire and use. 

When we treat strangers as already known and pegged, we degrade them by our transferences, typecasts and stereotypes. When we invalidate, we degrade. 

A degradation may be just or unjust, but when it follows from unexamined pre-judgment, it is inherently unjust. Degradation is a natural companion to not treating people, all people, I to Thou. In some social interactions, this hardly matters. While in line at the counter, I only need to be polite, maybe kind. But with people I meet frequently or intimately, where inter-dependence counts, where we share common community, it always matters.  The erosions of degrading encounter grind us down. The fuzzy line that draws a boundary of community should not be taken lightly or for granted. I should be careful not to assume you aren't my brother or sister or peer.

I wish I could claim success in not degrading others, but like kindness and my attention to empathy, it's a work in progress. It takes practice. 

The concept of micro-aggression has meanings similar to the degradation ceremonies of everyday life. Degradation covers a broad terrain not restricted to aggression, but if by aggression we mean the assertion of privilege to put others in their place, the territories are the same. 

Later, I hope to take up accreditation ceremonies and the function of attention, empathy, negotiation and moral dialog in accreditation and affirmation. My earlier thoughts with commentary on the role of these ceremonies in psychotherapy can be found in the essay, Degradation, Accreditation, and Rites of Passage, Psychiatry, 1979.  Also note Harold Garfinkel's Conditions for Successful Degradation Ceremonies, American Journal of Sociology, 1956.  And see, Walter Torres and Raymond Bergner's Humiliation: Its Nature and Consequences, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, 2010.

I have discussed the use of Paradigm Case Formulations in the entry, Empathy and the Problem of Definition.  The Descriptive Psychology concept of "community" is central to an understanding of the context of social roles and gives actions their particular meaning. Anthony Putman's essay, Communities, Advances in Descriptive Psychology, 1981, clarifies this vital concept.

Consider this Harvard Study on Depression and Discrimination: http://hms.harvard.edu/news/depression-and-discrimination?utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_content=s3&utm_campaign=1.05.15.HMS

But here's a song by John Hiatt, asking, is anybody there? Are you good enough?  It resonates.

Dreaming as Playtime

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.  Bob Dylan


I had a funny thought while dreaming.  I don't recall the details, but I was having fun talking with someone I really liked. I don't know what provoked me to say, "if I didn’t dream, I’d be too bored to sleep", but it woke me up. I jotted down some notes, went back to sleep and the conversation continued. 

Sometimes I go back to sleep to continue a dream or to mess around with the story. I like to sleep and dream. Freud suggested that dreams function to preserve sleep and that works for me. 

My experience of dreaming is not typical, nor is it fundamentally different from other people's, just a bit more lucid.  My dreaming has been shaped by my interest and the skills that come from paying careful attention. 

As an experimentalist, I was once part of a group that empirically demonstrated that one's current problems, dilemmas and opportunities are basic units of dream content and connect dream experience to waking life. I think we clarified that the dilemmas and opportunities represented during dreaming are similar to those a person has while awake but less constrained by the realities of the waking world.  This freedom invites dreams to be fleshed out by a person's imaginative capacities and interests. Freud called this a primary process governed by a pleasure principle freed from reality testing. But clearly dreams are more than that. 

Freud also recognized that dreams involve somewhat less deliberate thinking than waking thought and this provides dreams with an impulsive and emotional quality. Deliberation is not so essential when safe in bed. Pleasure and self-interest are prominent in dreams with ethical and moral concerns diminished since there is less consequence to what we do when asleep. The diminished role of ethical considerations may follow from dreams being a less deliberate act. What I do in my dreams doesn't get me in the same sort of trouble that waking action would, and I may be less prone to think about alternatives and consequences. 

More and more as I get older, my dreams provide an opportunity to

play. 

Every dream is personal, shaped by the dreamer's characteristics relevant to the circumstances the dream offers up. I am not someone else when dreaming but I go places and do things not otherwise possible. When asleep I am very skilled at flying. It took some practice but I'm good at it now. As a child, I'd sometimes crash, but now I soar. 

When I say I am not someone else when dreaming, it occurs to me that I have sometimes dreamt I was one of my dogs. But no one who knows me would find that out of character. 

Back to my sleepy wonderings.  Here's the gist of what I wrote down: 

1. Sleep is a necessary restorative. I can’t do without it.
2. Some dreams wake me up because they are too arousing, tedious, frustrating, or frightening. (Fortunately for me, these are rare, but those feelings are also rare in my current waking life.  Knock on wood.) 
3. If I didn’t have something interesting to dream, after “x” amount of sleep, my waking concerns would grab my attention and I'd awaken and be up to my usual mischief. So I get another forty winks, whether I need it or not.

So what I am wondering, and this question woke me up, does playful dreaming help preserve sleep by providing something interesting to stay asleep and think about? Of course, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. (That, in turn, reflects waking life's worries and opportunities).  Not to make too much of this, but most dreaming occurs in the later periods of sleep. 

As far as I know, dreams as a manner of keeping sleep interesting, as a way of playing, is under-explored in the literature. I am not arguing that the function of dreaming is to have a place to play but rather that dreams present an opportunity to play. Dreamplay might be adaptive but is a worthy thing-in-itself apart from any adaptive advantage it offers; a spandrel as Gould and Lewontin might say.

I have been thinking about play, especially creative play, as a fundamental feature of life, always an option when we're free of desperation and need, and maybe even then. Ernest Hartmann describes dreaming as making connections in a safe place. When those connections are fun, there's reason to remain asleep. 

Some references: Schwartz & Godwyn, Action and Representation in Ordinary and Lucid Dreams, 1988. Greenberg, Katz, Schwartz & Pearlman,  A Research Based Reconsideration of the Psychoanalytic Theory of Dreaming, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1992,  and Hartmann, E. The Nature and Function of Dreaming, Oxford 2011.  Gould and Lewontin, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" Proc. Roy. Soc. London B, 1979.

Do certain Fat-Tailed Lemurs hibernate to maximize dreamtime? Do you like interesting animal facts, then check this out: The Mysterious Brain of the Fat-Tailed Dwarf Lemur, the World's Only Hibernating Primate.  Klopfer and his team discovered that when hibernating dwarf lemurs sleep, they exclusively enter REM-sleep and they stay in REM sleep for an unusually long time. This is counter-intuitive since REM sleep involves a higher metabolic output than other states of sleep (at least for humans) : Metabolic rate and fuel utilization during sleep assessed by whole-body indirect calorimetry. ) Do these lemurs live to dream?

 And lizards dream, too.

And maybe the play is the thing:  Playing for the fun of it. Some notes on our playful universe.

Through-Lines, the Dramaturgical Pattern and the Structure of Improvisation: A work in progress.

Through-Lines, the Dramaturgical Pattern and the Structure of Improvisation:  A Descriptive Psychological Account

Abstract

Improvisation creates novel social practices, manners of engagement and meaning, that are  intrinsic to the lives of persons. Unfortunately, most existing systems of psychology, given their commitment to causal explanation and reductionism while attempting to be systematic and scientific, have failed to provide a satisfying account of the creative nature of improvisation. In contrast, those psychologies that do embrace the creative and novel tend to lack sufficient systematic structure required for an intellectually satisfying understanding of persons, let alone an empirical science. An exception to this state of affairs can be found in the discipline of Descriptive Psychology. The Descriptive Psychology concepts of Dramaturgical Pattern and Through-Lines are offered as tools serviceable for a precise and systematic clarification of improvisation in everyday life.

Part 1: Some Descriptive Psychology Concepts

.... All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place. ... (109)
.... Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. .... (126) Ludwig Wittgenstein, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

What makes an individual a person is, paradigmatically, to have mastered the concept of a Person. Peter G. Ossorio, PLACE

Improvisation creates novel social practices, manners of engagement and meaning that are an intrinsic feature of the lives of persons. Unfortunately, most existing systems of psychology, given their commitment to causal explanation and reductionism, while attempting to be systematic and scientific, have failed to provide a satisfying account of the creative nature of improvisation. In contrast, those psychologies that do embrace the creative and novel tend to lack sufficient systematic structure required for an intellectually satisfying understanding of persons, let alone an empirical science. An exception to this state of affairs can be found in the discipline of Descriptive Psychology as it has unfolded over the last forty or so years.

Descriptive Psychology is the intellectual discipline that makes explicit the implicit structure of the behavioral sciences. It develops conceptual, pre-empirical and theory-neutral formulations identifying the full range of a subject matter. This concern with full inclusion, with clarifying the full set of possibilities, is a hallmark of Descriptive Psychology.

The pre-empirical work is accomplished through identifying and interrelating the essential concepts, the vital distinctions, characterizing all possible instances of a subject matter.  The empirical project, on the other hand, involves finding the specific possibilities and patterns that actually occur. To do this, we use our conceptual tools and go out and look.  Descriptive Psychology separates the conceptual and empirical from the theoretical. The conceptual formulation is logically prior to finding appropriate empirical instances.

Once an adequate conceptualization is achieved, theory may be employed for explaining why, out of the full range of possibility, only certain empirical patterns are found.

What I hope to accomplish here is to provide a very brief introduction to Descriptive Psychology relevant to a systematic exploration of improvisation. So, to set a stage, here is a relevant set of descriptive maxims that identify some of the structure of improvisation. From Ossorio’s Place, (1998/2012):

F5. If C makes the first move in a social practice, that invites Z to continue the enactment of the practice by making the corresponding second move. (Move 1 invites Move 2.)
F6. If C makes the second move in a social practice, it makes it difficult for Z not to have already made the first move. (Move 2 preempts Move 1 ex post facto.)
F7. Z’s positive or negative evaluation of C’s behavior provides reasons for C to continue, discontinue, modify, or elaborate (etc.) such behavior.

For purposes of this essay, I am going to focus on the Descriptive Psychological concept of a person as an individual who is inherently able to improvise.

A Person is an individual who paradigmatically engages in:

1. Deliberate Action (An intentional or goal directed action in which the actor is both cognizant and chooses to do it)
2. Language  (deliberate symbolic verbal behavior)
3. The significance of which reflects the actor’s perspectives and concerns with Hedonics (pleasure, pain, disgust, noxiousness, etc), prudence (self -interest, what is to my advantage or disadvantage, aesthetics (fittingness in the artistic, intellectual and social domains), ethics/morality (right or wrong, fair or unfair, just or unjust, and carries duty or obligation).  
4. Resulting in a Dramaturgical Pattern of intelligible Through-Lines  (i.e. significance patterns).

The concept of behavior employed in Descriptive Psychology involves a Parametric Analysis of Intentional Action allowing an observer to indicate how any particular action is the same or different from any other action. It looks like this:

  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.

Persons as Deliberate Actors are able to self-regulate or adjust their behavior to fit their changing circumstances in response to their appraisal of how effective they are in achieving their goals. For this, Descriptive Psychology employs the Actor-Observer-Critic feedback loop of self-regulation. A person is an Actor able to Observe and describe his behavior and Critique and adjust his behavior accordingly.  The observer’s role involves engaging in Cognizant Action and the critic role involves Deliberate Action.

Although this feedback could be a process of deliberation, of thinking through the possibilities, it ordinarily isn't. Instead, for the most part, people simply recognize their options and what they take is the "best" course to follow.

The A-O-C model naturally relates to the concepts of Intentional, Cognizant and Deliberate Action. Cognizant and Deliberate Action are types of Intentional Action along with Emotional and Unconscious action. All are intentional but not all involve the same degree of awareness. Emotional actions are cases where a person has a tendency to act intentionally and immediately on their recognition or reality appraisal without deliberation.

I will employ the concepts above in what follows.

Part 2: Through-Lines and the Dramaturgical Pattern

“Dealing with heterogeneous behavior patterns as a single type of behavior does nothing toward elucidating the pattern. And yet the understanding of such full scale patterns in real life is essential for understanding the behavior of persons.”
(Peter G. Ossorio, The Behavior of Persons, 2013, p 293)

Everyone has a place on the stage of the world. Everyone is in the game. The stage has props and actors. The game has rules and boundaries. The players have statuses assigned by themselves and others as they go about their different roles.  Some people are well cast for what they encounter and some are not.  At times people recognize the part they are playing, at times they don’t. How cognizant and well cast is always a matter of “more or less”.

Although there are reality constraints, how the drama or game unfolds is uncertain. The actors are agents who play within and against the constraints.

Living one's life involves improvisation.  There is no “script” except ex post facto; it emerges from the interaction. The actors might be told what they should be doing, they may have plans, but such direction does not determine what actually happens.  The only certainty is that choices will be made and action will ensue.  Actions will follow from the opportunities and dilemmas that accompany each player’s unfolding circumstances given their individual and changing powers and dispositions.  Since it is improvisation, the actors will change each other as they interact, as their response incorporates the other player's moves.

Conceptualization:

What a person finds significant organizes their selection of specific behaviors. Implementation rests on both recognized opportunity and the actor’s competence.  Implementation is the performance. I know what I am doing because I know what I am about. I make choices based on their significance to me. You understand what I am about by observing and thinking about my performances. Performances have achievements and consequences.

Notable patterns of significance implemented over time with their corresponding consequences establish what I am calling a  “through-line”.  This concept bears a family resemblance to Stanislaviski’s (1936/1989) concept of through lines but is adapted for the purposes of precise behavior description rather than actor motivation.

Through-lines identify what it is in character and out of character for an actor. Keep in mind that self-status claims of something being “out of character” may be “in character”.  People can deny responsibility and disown their actions. It takes an observer-critic to point out when this happens.

Through-lines identify not just the organization of patterns of significance, but also the actor’s power and disposition to use what is achieved for corrective feedback. Through-lines are constituent treads of life's dramaturgical patterns.

Identifying through-lines is an observer’s task, subject to all the dilemmas of observation, disagreement and negotiation. Notice that as an observer's task, the identification of through-lines involves an appreciation of the actor’s reckoning with the consequences of implementation.  Implementation, the performance of the intended act, achieves some new state of affairs. Consequences, to the extent known, are part of corrective feedback. Here cognizance matters. The observer can be the actor or someone else.  Corrective feedback can be effective or ineffective. Does the actor learn from his mistakes? Are mistakes even recognized? Does the actor have the know-how or competence to do something differently when similar circumstances recur?

The pattern of through-lines intertwined together over the course of life weaves a dramaturgical pattern of unfolding social practices, performances linked by their achieved consequence and significance.  People simultaneously and sequentially live on many fronts as they go about their lives. Some through-lines may appear consistent with the other ways a person goes about living, while others may not. Some may appear for a time, disappear, later to reemerge. They may end in satisfaction or be abandoned in frustrated disappointment. They may be given up with insight or because of an absence of opportunity for expression. Some may seem to go on forever.

The fundamental coherence of the dramaturgical patterns is that a person's life makes narrative sense. The choices made are not random or arbitrary but follow from opportunity and the significances that a person's values, knowledge and competency allow. But people are complicated. Circumstances are complicated. Even knowing a person's true colors, they still can throw you for a loop.

Part 3: Formulation of "Through-Lines" and "Dramaturgical Pattern"

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Søren Kierkegaard

"The appropriate size of the unit for conceptualizing a person is not a behavior but a life history."
Peter G. Ossorio

"You do not know that your intentions will be carried out but you can suppose that they will be. Then you must have an idea about the rest of your day. Don't you feel that solid line as it stretches out into the future, fraught with cares, responsibilities, joys, and griefs? In looking ahead there is a certain movement, and where there is movement a line begins."  
Constantin Stanislavski

"I spoke of performers and audiences; of routines and parts; of performances coming off or falling flat; of cues, stage settings and backstage; of dramaturgical needs, dramaturgical skills, and dramaturgical strategies. Now it should be admitted that this attempt to press a mere analogy so far was in part a rhetoric and a maneuver." 
Erving Goffman

A Dramaturgical Model

"In the Dramaturgical Model, behavior is intrinsically and fundamentally a matter of creating and realizing personal and social dramas. Human lives are intrinsically and fundamentally dramatic in form."

"... a drama is a structured behavioral episode or series of episodes which makes sense to Us." Peter G. Ossorio


Dramaturgical patterns are the creative improvisation of individuals, of ongoing and overlapping social practices, resulting in the creation of their worlds.

Through-lines are significance-implementation-achievement patterns of social practices. Through-lines are the observed patterns of choice made by a person that reflect what the person finds intrinsic. Significance linked intrinsic social practices are through-lines. A set of temporally co-occurring through-lines, a "bundle", constitute some of the intentional aspects of the overall Dramaturgical Pattern for any meaningful duration up to and including a person's entire life span. (The word "world" derives from an old Anglo-Saxon locution that meant "the course of a man's life").

Nothing necessarily ties a bundle together except that the varied through-lines express a person's significant concerns enacted in the same life-interval. Sequential and co-occurring through-lines may be relatively independent, or have a dynamic relationship of interdependence, conflict, complementarity, inhibition, and so on.

The overall Dramaturgical Pattern with its constituent through-lines involves a person's response to sought-after and unsought circumstances.  Accidents and the passage of time are the not chosen features of life that necessarily shape a person's history. A person's life also includes average expected challenges that follow from age, sex, gender, class, culture, appearance, etc.

The overall Dramaturgical Pattern also involves social practices independent from what an observer classifies as a through-line.  Some challenges and opportunities might happen infrequently resulting in one-off behavior hard to classify. An observer may be noncommittal about assigning such behavior as in or out of character. Some social practices may not be part of a discernible through-line.

A person creates a world in the wake of his progress. In the role of observer-critic, a person notes the quality and significance of how his implementations create, change and maintain this world.

From a observer's perspective, a through-line is a set of social practices, extended over time, that constitute the enactment of a status that is a significant aspect of a person's identity.  The observer can be oneself or another.

A person's self-knowledge of engaging in what she finds intrinsically significant will correspond to what she can acknowledge as in character. Observers may differ about the adequacy or accuracy of such self-status assignments.

Given continued relevance and opportunity, a through-line can appear, disappear and reappear. Significant changes in what a person finds intrinsically significant correspond to where a through-line may start and end.  There are as many through-lines as an observer can potentially identify.

Identification and Knowledge of Through-Lines:

To say that a Person "A" knows one of Person "B's" Through-Lines, she would have observed that

A) "B" engaged in a series of social practices that

B) Share a common significance

C) The specific implementation/performance of the practices

D) What the implementations achieved in "B's" world

E) What "B" knows regarding what the implementations achieved

F) How "B" appraised the consequences of the achievement

G) How "B" did or did not correct his course of action based on his appraisal of the consequences.

And produce

H) A significance description that encompasses A) through G) and names this particular through-line. (Reduce the details and/or increase the abstraction until a workable encompassing significance description can be offered).

The through-line will describe improvisational creative engagements with the circumstances of a person's world in which a person's relevant personal characteristics are identified as making understandable the way the person acts given their opportunities and dilemmas.

To the extent that an observer identifies significance linked intrinsic social practices germane to the actor's identity, she will have identified a through-line.  She could just as well be commenting on the actor's world since she will be offering a commentary that links the actor's personal characteristics to the sort of world he finds, creates and maintains.

The Descriptive Psychological concept "through-lines" resides in an intermediate zone between social practices and ways of life (Ossorio, 2006/2013).  People know how they expect to live their lives; looking back, their observer-critics can understand what they actually did.

Incomplete descriptions of through-lines that lack information regarding their significance and achievement correspond to the standard dispositional descriptions of traits, attitudes, interests and styles.

Part 4: Examples of Through-Lines

The through-line concept refers to a person's history of varied performances that have a common and recurring significance. Any personal characteristic can be an aspect of a through-line description.  Here’s some examples of how they look. When there is opportunity and while doing other things as well:

She heedlessly and perhaps unconsciously goes through life attempting to score competitive victories with women who resemble her mother and does so with an eye toward currying favor with unobtainable men. 

While fearfully avoiding degradation, he manages his affairs in such a way as to offend no one while never stepping outside of what be thinks are his competencies. 



He consciously and unconsciously strives to put people in a helpless position in a manner that keeps him, in his view, on the moral high ground. 



Terrified of being alone and doubting her worth to others, she seeks satisfaction by tolerating the abusive needs of others or in actions that undo and distract her from being aware of her loneliness.

Requiring a sense of specialness, he looks for opportunities to demonstrate his worth by achievement in competitive arenas while making sure not to out-step the values and achievements of those he considers the conventional esteemed judges. 



Notice the multiplicity of similar and dissimilar performances that can be the enactment, performance or implementation of the significance described in any of the examples above.

Further:

There is not always opportunity nor will an opportunity that exists in the ongoing circumstances always be reason enough for something of significance to be enacted. A person's other significant hedonic, prudent, aesthetic and ethical perspectives might prevail. Still, over time, patterns can be observed by self or other defining what is in character for the actor in question.

Some through-lines can coexist with other through-lines. And some implementations may satisfy a variety of through-lines. 



A through-line is a significance driven description that can be built with any and all of the relevant features needed to make a pattern understandable regarding what a person is repeatedly up to in the course of their life.

Some through-lines end in satisfaction, some are out grown or are no longer relevant, some are extended compulsively without satisfaction, while others are extended because the satisfactions remain valued. 

They may look, in some cases, to the psychoanalytic observer as a function of a fixation.

A through-line that has significant unconscious aspects is prone to unsatisfying repetition since the actor is not in a good position to critically modify behavior or reorder priorities.  This is the heart of the repetition compulsion if it involves fundamental and ongoing desire. Sex, trauma and dependency may work this way when the desire for connection, restoration or support remains without a self-aware practicing of alternative serviceable implementations. Without adequate self-critical awareness, a person may repeat a tragic pattern, feeling born to lose unable to learn from misfortune.

Through-lines organize a descriptive narrative in a manner that highlights a status dynamic similar to what Roy Schafer (1976) called psychoanalytic action language.

While writing this I was troubled by the generally negative, restrictive and pathological tone of the examples. To the extent that pathology involves a restriction in behavior potential or ability, it is often easier to identify patterns. Pathological restrictions limits performance in a manner that produces stereotyped behaviors.  This is what allows diagnostic categories to work. Pathology is simpler than health. The through-lines of the healthy are organized in a manner that involves varied and flexible satisfactions with less insistent repetition. A happy and healthy life is less predicable than one restricted by fixation and compulsion. So how's this:

Grabbing all the gusto she can, mindful of the rights and plights of others but careful not to compromise herself, she speaks truth to power while seeking novelty, pleasure and beauty.



Works Cited

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1959

Ossorio, Peter G. Place. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. 1998/2012

Ossorio, Peter G. The Behavior of Persons. Ann Arbor, MI: Descriptive Psychology Press. 2006/2013

Schafer, Roy. A New Language for Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1976

Stanislavski, Constantin.   An Actor Prepares.  New York: Routledge. 1936/1989

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations.  Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. 1953/2009



The following is from a May 11th, 2014  exchange between Joe Jeffrey and myself regarding the "through-line" concept:

1) What's the difference between "pattern of significance" and "pattern of behaviors," particularly in light of the fact that the concept of behavior includes that of significance? In other words, is "pattern of significance" saying anything different from "pattern of intrinsic practices"? If so, what?

I am always amazed that although the concept of "intrinsic practices" makes immediate sense to me, rarely do others outside our team get it. Patterns of intrinsic behavior, I think, mean behaviors that are not instrumental, that is, not done for the purposes of doing something else. Instead, intrinsic behaviors are self-contained in purpose, are reason enough without having to refer to another behavior or level of significance to make understandable. So, to the question are "patterns of significance" different from "patterns of behavior,": Yes, I do mean something different. All Intentional Actions (IA) have Significance (S) of some sort and that significance may be intrinsic or instrumental. A through-line identifies a group or pattern of behaviors that over time show the same Significance. The Performance (P) parameter (the implementation) may be the same or different, the S parameter is always the same.

Now, this is where the issue of usefulness appears. At some level of abstraction all of a person's S can be one of, I guess, 4 significances, Hedonic, Prudent, etc. so at the most abstract and not very useful level, at least not descriptively or clinically useful, we could talk about the interplay of hedonic, prudent.... through lines. (But as I will indicate below, even so it is more than that). We'd see individual differences but at too molar, too large a grouping, to really help understand an individual person's status dynamics. It is sort of dealer's choice what degree of abstraction is useful and the examples I have provided get at that intermediate level somewhere between a social practice and a way of life. (I suppose we would find similar difficulties with "ways of life".)

So "pattern of significance" seems clear to me but maybe it creates some ambiguity with all IAs having significance. I mean the IAs that have the same S even through the P may be the same or very different.

2) What is the point of talking about implementation? Is it any different from the existing concepts of personal characteristics, which include the concept of the version of an intrinsic practice the person engages in (e.g., "He much prefers driving in the outside lane," "She put a high priority on esthetic considerations in everything she does," "He's aggressive, but in a passive, low-power style," etc.) Or, to ask it differently, what would be missing if you left out all reference to implementation, and just said, "Patterns of significance" (or, "Patterns if intrinsic practices"?)

And here is where I thought I was using just another ordinary language synonym for performance, i.e. implementation. One of the intellectual powers of Descriptive is an attempt at exact and precise language with a particular attention to nuance. I have learned when talking to members outside the tribe that our repeated use of the same word becomes baseball talk for me but soccer for her. So using a variety of words with the same meaning while anchoring them in the exact formulation of IA parameters seems to help clear up the way I am using our technical language. . I am surprised, at times, when I use the term "Performance" and people take it to mean something different than the P parameter. So I use other words that seem to clear up the nuanced meaning such as Implementation. Seems to work with them but maybe not so much with us.

In any case, there are many ways to perform or implement a behavior, an IA, that has shared significance. I find all sorts of ways to get myself in the same sort of trouble but you might not notice I was up to the same sort of mischief if you only looked at the P or the implementation without knowing that they share the same S.

One other point for now: The S matters but for the observer of a through line, the actors K of A and how that effects subsequent implementations is also key. This feedback is of central clinical/status dynamic significance. So modifiers like, Mindfully, Heedlessly, Recklessly, With-ever-greater focus, are part of a possible through line description.


3) Pete says (Behavior of Persons, p. 290), "At a concrete level of description the behavior pattern in question is a sequence of Versions of multiply overlapping social practices. The larger scale structure will not be a social practice.....The term "drama" is use here to designate such behavior patterns: a drama is a structured behavioral episodes or series of episodes which make sense to Us." So: when you talk about through-lines, are you saying anything different than "dramas" -- i.e., structured series of behavioral episodes that make sense to Us?" If you are, could you help me see what?

Yes and no. I am giving the observer's description of repeated dramas. A person engages in many different overlapping dramas and the dramas that share the same significance are through-lines in a person's life.

4) Your characterization, "through-lines are significance-implementation-achievement patterns of social practices" appears to articulating a particular kind of behavior description, a "through-line description," just as "achievement description" is a form of behavior description. Specifically, it is form of description that identifies a pattern, the intrinsic practices, the versions of those practices, and the specific outcomes of those versions." As I believe have said elsewhere, I think that's an excellent idea, one that is very helpful, particularly in making sense of a person's life. If that is the case, we would have available things like, "Let's give a through-line description of the dramas [the structured series of behavioral episodes] that comprise this guys life, and look carefully at the kind of outcomes he keeps getting." In other words, through-line description would be a tool for helping focus on one aspect or another of a person's life, in an organized, systematic way. We would have immediately a series of questions: 1) OK, it's a pattern; what kind of pattern? Sequential? Scattered over time? Constantly overwhelming all others dramas? Appropriate to the circumstances? Idiosyncratic but not pathological? 2) What intrinsic practices? 3) What kind of versions? 4) What kind of outcomes? So: am I correct or not? Is the concept here that of through-line description?

Yes.

Maxims for Vertebrates (Policies and Behavioral Logic)

and how chasing your tail makes sense. 

Policies are guides to how we'd like to live our lives. Maxims are the behavioral logic that guide proper description.

"If the situation calls for a person to do something they can't do, they will do something they can do instead," is different from the more hopeful, "people do the best they can", since it is pretty clear, often enough, they don't. People doing the best they can is a kind and generous variation of the policy "give people the benefit of the doubt," and that's usually a good first move. 

There is a conceptual difference between behavioral logic, the Descriptive Psychological maxims employed to guide proper description, and personal and therapeutic policies that represent our values and the direction we hope life will take. To give people the benefit of the doubt, to treat them as doing the best they can, is a good first move since it usually avoids starting off on the wrong foot with a degradation. Of course, when we treat someone as doing the best they can and they know damn well they're not, we might end up disqualifying ourselves as competent judges. It's a risk, but that's why policies are different from maxims. Policies are to be followed until or unless we have reason enough not to, whereas behavioral logic in the form of maxims are the constraints or the rules for correctly framed descriptions.

The body of behavioral logic that constitutes the maxims in Descriptive Psychology is "an open-ended collection, since there is no limit to the different warning, reminders, etc. that might appropriately be given by one person to another in regard to describing persons and their behavior" (Ossorio, PLACE, 1998/2012).

People always act within their values, knowledge and competence. What else can they do? But do they do their best? Sometimes, maybe. This illustrates the difference between logical forms, the grammar of making sense, and social policies and choice principles. "If the situation calls for a person to do something they can't do, they will do something they can do instead," is a logical form, a tautology. Treating people as doing the best they can, is a social policy, a manner of not engaging in a dismissive or degrading stance.  

Maxims can also serve as a sort of grammar that guides the shape of a hypothesis or empirical generalization. In these cases, the logical structure serves as the frame for the empirical content.

"When over-excited or in doubt, groom," is an example of an empirical generalization of a pattern of vertebrate behavior.  Grooming, whether a response to over-excitment or confusing uncertainty, is an example of the more general notion of displacement behavior, something I was taught when I was going to be a zoologist. I was taught that displacement behavior sometimes occurs when an animal is in a situation that might call for aggression but where aggression, for whatever reason, would be problematic for the animal’s survival. This includes conflicts over food, dangerous sexual challenges, or when a juvenile gets too rough with an adult of greater threat potential. For some zoologists, displacement was a manner of bookkeeping drive and excitement, a way of accounting for “frustrated aggression”.

The maxim, "If the situation calls for a person to do something they can't do, they will do something they can do instead" can provide a structure to house displacement behavior in the form of the hypothesis, “If a situation would appear to call for an animal to do something that might put it in a worse position, it will likely do something else instead”. This is also informed by a modification of the maxim, “A person values some states of affairs over others and acts accordingly”.  Grooming serves social cohesion and also feels good, prudent and hedonic motives, and so also fits the maxim, "If a person has two reasons for doing X, they have a stronger reason for doing X than if they have only one of these reasons."

The Maxim, “if a situation calls for something a person can’t do, they will do something they can do", is open concerning what it is that the person will choose or select from their behavior potential. Selections are not random or arbitrary, hence, “If a person values a specific something….they will thereby also value other specific things of the same kind to the extent that they are relevantly similar to the original.”

Displacement attempts to accomplish something relevant, given the circumstances, even if it is not what the observer might expect at first glance.

My puppy Hart has a policy, “When you can’t steal the bone, chase your tail.”

More on Maxims can be found in the entry, People Make Sense...., and on therapeutic policies, Mindful Uncertainty: What is Psychotherapy.  And in the Degradation Ceremonies of Everyday Life.

A Short Course in Descriptive Psychology

.... All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place. ... (109)
.... Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. .... (126) 

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. (xiv)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

What makes an individual a person is, paradigmatically, to have mastered the concept of a Person. Peter G. Ossorio, PLACE


It is unfortunately clear that the social enterprise called Behavioral Science lacks an adequate and shared framework. The absence of an explicit articulation and map of the concepts that constitute the behavioral sciences impedes intelligible communication and comparative study.  Descriptive Psychology, developed by Peter Ossorio, addresses this head on and provides a fresh start.    

Descriptive Psychology is the intellectual discipline that makes explicit the implicit structure of the behavioral sciences. It concerns conceptual, pre-empirical and theory-neutral formulations that allow and facilitate the identification of the full range of a subject matter. To the extent legitimate examples or possibilities are found outside an existing Descriptive formulation, the formulation is enlarged or revised. 

The pre-empirical work is accomplished through identifying and interrelating the essential concepts, the vital distinctions, characterizing all possible instances of a subject matter. The empirical project, on the other hand, involves finding the specific possibilities and patterns that actually occur. To do this, we use our conceptual tools and go out and look. 

Descriptive Psychology separates the conceptual and empirical from the theoretical. 

We start with conceptualization, then find the data that has a place within the conceptualization. Conceptual formulation is logically prior to finding appropriate empirical instances. 

Once an adequate conceptualization is achieved, theory can be employed for explaining why, out of the full range of possibility, only certain empirical patterns are found. But that is not Descriptive Psychology's job. For that task, I might wear my psychoanalytic hat or assemble the tools and hypotheses provided by any of the standard theories or invent new ones. 

Descriptive Psychology's conceptual tools explicate and assemble the logical structure of behavior and serve as a formal check on the logical adequacy of description and theory. 

Descriptive Psychology explicates the Person Concept as the fundamental structure of the behavioral sciences. The Person Concept is a single, coherent concept which involves the interrelated concepts of Individual Person, Behavior, Language and World. Descriptive Psychology establishes the rules of construction, composition, and relationship that articulate how these concepts are interconnected.

Only Individual Person and Behavior will be addressed in this entry and only in a very basic manner. 

The diagrams and illustrations that follow are ones I use in classes on psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice taught from the perspective of Descriptive Psychology.  I also use them in a seminar on supervision.  They are applicable across the behavioral sciences.  Most of the diagrams have a link elaborating the content.

Let's start with the concept of a person:

 I explore this in greater detail in the essay What is a Person? And how can we be sure?

And then examine behavior through the concept of Intentional Action by way of the Agency Diamond:

This represents five of the eight parameters of the full case of Intentional Action that has the conceptually separable dimensions of Identity, Wants, Knows, Knows How, Performance, Achievement, Significance, and Personal Characteristic.  

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 is 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.  What the actor is up to by performing the act in question.

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

Agency descriptions concern goal directed or purposeful behavior. These descriptions are defined by something recognized and wanted that the person knows how to do. Behavior is motivated by opportunity and dilemma. It involves a performance in real time that achieves some difference in the person's world.

This is explored further in the blog entry, Intentional Action, Empathy and Psychotherapy.

We then go on to represent Cognizant and Self-Aware Action:

                                   

In Cognizant Action people know they are engaged in some sort of an Intentional Action.  This is represented by the small diamond above the Knows parameter.

We are now ready to look at a special case of Intentional Action called Deliberate Action in which people choose an action from alternative ways of reaching a goal given how they understand or appraise their circumstance. This is the paradigm case of the behavior of persons. 

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).

Another way of going about this is to remember that persons as Deliberate Actors are able to self-regulate or adjust their behavior to fit their changing circumstances in response to their appraisal of how effective they are in achieving  their goals. For this we employ the Actor-Observer-Critic feedback loop of self-regulation. A person is an Actor able to Observe and describe his behavior and Critique and adjust his behavior accordingly. 

Adapted with permission from C.J. Stone's "Actor Central". 

Although this feedback could be a process of deliberation, of thinking through the possibilities, it ordinarily isn't. Instead, for the most part, people simply recognize their options and what they take is the "best" course to follow. 

Psychopathology involves something going wrong in this feedback loop and psychotherapists, one way or another, intervene by taking on the function of an adjunctive observer-critic. 

The A-O-C model naturally relates to the concepts of Intentional, Cognizant and Deliberate Action. Cognizant and Deliberate Action are types of Intentional Action along with Emotional and Unconscious action. All are intentional but not all involve the same degree of awareness. Emotional actions are cases where a person has a tendency to act intentionally and immediately on their recognition without deliberation. 

I take up the concept of emotional action and emotional competence in the posting Emotional Competence, Self-Experience, and Developmental Patterns.

At this point it might be useful to look at the Judgment or Decision Diagram that illustrates the structure of making an appraisal.

This is a reconstruction, performed after an action, given an agent's Personal Characteristics, of how they weighed their hedonic, prudent, aesthetic, and ethical/moral values in their Judgment or Decision on what Behavior to enact. Although Judgment or Decision could be an active process of thinking through options, of deliberating about the circumstances, it usually isn't. Often enough, a person simply knows what they want to do. Their appraisal of a situation is immediate. On the other hand, if the behavior goes wrong, a person might rethink their judgment by reconstructing their action in a way the diagram illustrates. Later, we will use this diagram to help understand unconscious motivation, transference, and symptomatic or compromised behaviors.

But first I'd like to show how the Intentional Action model can provide insight into Empathy in a non mysterious way: 

We can use this model to look in more detail at the more or less quality of an empathic understanding as well as the kindred concept of mentalization, a concept I find far less problematic than "theory of mind". Wil does not have a theory that Gil is a deliberate actor with a mind of his own.  He simply takes it to be the case unless he has reason not to. Wil's becoming a person required engaging with others as deliberate actors. He didn't first need a theory or assumption to see others as like himself in this way. However, if in some autistic manner he does not adequately know others to be minded, this model might be a way to teach him by showing the factors involved. 

This is elaborated in the essay, "The Parameters of Empathy."

Bear in mind that Wil does not have direct access to Gil's Wants, Knowledge, or Know How, but can only observe and think about the Significance of Gil's Performance and Achievement. The yellow and green IA diamonds above Wil's representation of Gil's behavior show that Wil more or less empathically recognizes that Gil has his own choices and is also a Deliberate Actor, i.e., a person like himself. This is how I understand "metallization". This is how Wil can put himself in Gil's shoes. 

Earlier, I probably should have introduced a very important conceptual tool, The Relationship Formula, since this is logically related to the concept of Intentional Action and will be a key to understanding both emotional behavior and behavior that doesn't follow the expected norm, along with a host of other important questions we often ask when behavior doesn't go as expected (and even when it does). As you will see, we are very fond of unless clauses in Descriptive Psychology. 

Should you be interested, I make use of this formula in my essay, Sex and a Person's True Colors.

So let's use the concept of Intentional Action and the Relationship Formula to make sense of Emotional Behavior. Say, for example, you are sitting quietly at your desk working on your blog when a Zombie enters:

Regardless of what you might report feeling, stomach dropping, heart pounding and nearly breathless, what makes this an example of emotional behavior is your immediate attempt to escape the danger without having to think it over. This impulsive quality is typical of what we are call an emotional response. Here's the behavioral logic:

     

     Adapted from The Behavior of Persons, 2013, Peter G. Ossorio

And we can make sense of most of what we are likely to call emotion this way: 

A lot to digest. But if you're ready, I'd like to pull some of this together by way of clarifying some aspects of unconscious action. Since I am a psychoanalyst, this seems obligatory. Let's start with the logically necessary reminder that the unconscious is an Observer's construct. The unconscious refers to what I notice about you, that you can't recognize about yourself.  Since no one has a pipeline to the truth, when interpreting something as unconscious, we are entering a domain of disagreement, contention, and defensiveness. I liken this to the lawyer's dilemma when facing opposing counsel, jury and judge. It boils down to making a case that regardless of its merits will be accepted or rejected.

The issues of interpretation are explored in the earlier post  On the interpretation of unconscious action and self-deception.

And now, finally, I going to reposition some of this using a variant of the Judgment diagram that was introduced earlier. Here are some fundamental distinctions that involve the concept of unconscious action and recognition (transference) as well as motives that a person might refuse to acknowledge as their own (although if given sufficient reason, they might.)  

This is further elaborated in  Bad Faith, Self-deception and Unconscious Motivation.  

Notice how domains two and three are likely sources of disagreement and are also sources of behavior going wrong, being compromised, bungled, or mysterious to the Actor.  The unconscious and unexamined is difficult to socialize since it is unavailable for moral dialog, self-correction and negotiation.  It's where we mess up.

At this point, I think I'll call it a day.

Another way of approaching the question of What is Descriptive Psychology can be found in the entry: People Make Sense: Foundations for Behavioral Science.

I take up Language and Verbal Behavior in: Language, influence and self-presentation: Lessons for the young therapist.

And the concept of Reality and World in: What is reality?

The Person Concept with an updated parametric analysis of Tony Putman's concept of Community can be found in: The Person Concept: The foundation of behavioral science.