Hal P.--931202, to Bill P.--931201
I do think it helps when you or anyone tells me stories to explain his
or her position. For one thing, it enables me to see that I agree
with 1,000% on the dangers of treating people as categories. My own
experience of that emerged from growing up the only child of a pair of
clinicians who were at once radically critical of therapeutic
practices and inclined to put everyone they met into a profile.
The bottom line, we also agree, is that none of us can predict whether
the next behavior coming out of any of us will be as expected.
But I still think we can propose and test our guesses as to whether
your control disturbances or mine will be amplified or dampened by
choosing one course of behavior rather than another. I keep being
told I don't get it, but let me try again: I'm thinking that
organization in this instance refers to the nature of the comparators
we select. You say it yourself when you criticize the way the
"psychotic" people you knew as individuals were treated as categories
by others. Those you criticize had as comparators a notion of what
position this person occupies (what diagnostic category the person
falls into) and hence of what kind of response to the person was
indicated (what course of treatment). In this definition of the
situation, any gap between the observer's notion of rationality and
reality and the psychotic's is a threat to the observer's sense of
control.
Instead, you rolled with the interaction. My guess is that when you
encountered unexpected behavior, you actually encouraged the so-called
psychotic person to help make his or her world familiar to you, so
that you gained a sense of control as you found yourself engaging the
psychotic person's reality. My theory tells me you found this
possible because the people you were interacting with were so grateful
to anyone who failed to treat them as categories and willing to dare
to engage that they reciprocated readily: they implicitly satisfied
you that they were engaged in your reality.
When Martin is it? and perhaps others speak of intentionality, I
relate to it this way: I feel threatened by someone whose series of
responses to others indicate that they have a set position and course
of treatment of others in mind. I refer to this as an unchanging or
unresponsive motive for behavior. The motive or intentionality can no
more be directly observed than can a quark, but it can be inferred
from a course of interaction, as when someone persists in confirming
that someone else is one of your typical paranoid schizophrenics.
As I see it Martin is struggling, like me, to put PCT into the context
of his own research. As I see it he gets much the same response:
there's nothing worth studying of possible to know except PCT. The
interesting part to me is that Martin's protests, like mine, that he
finds PCT true albeit not the whole truth, falls on deaf ears: he,
like me, is treated as trying to destroy or dismiss PCT. I think
instead each of us is in his own way trying to RELATE to it. Within
my theory, my continuing frustration is a continued insistence that if
you cannot become a wholehearted PCT-er, your work and thoughts don't
matter to PCT-ers--that I have to be like you or else I'm out of
control. Here's an irony to me, Bill--that in rejecting the dogma of
dianetics you seem to require strict behaviorism in its place. If I'm
correct, there will be hard-core strength among PCT-ers for the
duration, but a growing gap between their realities and those of the
rest of us who don't want to have to convert in order to relate.
I feel as though I'm struggling here. I make no pretense of being
articulate or clever. But I do perceive that I'm encountering an
unwavering motive or intentionality among those who criticize me for
"attacking" PCT, and seem to do likewise now with Martin as another
for instance, and I wonder, Bill, Rick...can you see what I'm trying
to drive at for now? l&p hal