[From Bill Powers (950827.0100 MDT)]
Rick Marken (950826.1820) --
(to Ed Ford) I humbly apologize for my sarcasm if it hurt you. That
was certainly not my intent.
There are people who will not believe that.
Interesting, isn't it, how control systems will react against a
disturbance? You may not even know what perceptions you're disturbing,
but you can tell you disturbed something because suddenly there's
another output pushing back against yours.
I was explaining to Ed Ford yesterday that the simplest way for a
disruptive kid to understand what's going on is to experience a strong
and immediate reaction from the people he's disrupting. There's only one
problem that doesn't yield easily to this sort of experience: the kid
whose goal is to create a strong reaction in other people. What usually
happens to this kind of kid is that other people want to give not only a
strong reaction, but a much stronger one than the kid had in mind. This
is the kid who would end up completely outside Ed's program and the
school, being dealt with by official force downtown.
Well, kid, you got your reaction from Ed. You had to go pretty far to
get it, but you got it. So now what do you have?
Yes, I'm listening to myself.
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Ed Ford (950826.daytime) --
Don't go away, Ed. You stick up for yourself very effectively, and
there's no reason to give up. There are plenty of people on this net,
including me, who admire your work.
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David Goldstein (952608) --
This seems to be a day for clashes between applications people and
theoreticians.
As a PCT therapist, I know that the control of experience is how
we are organizied. I am acting like a good control system to care
more about my input (namely, progress) than my output (PCT therapy,
drug therapy, family therapy, etc.).
Understood. I trust that by "input" and "progress" you mean perceived
input and perceived progress.
I still believe that in PCT there are the seeds of a new approach to
therapy -- not just to the methods of therapy, but to the way we
evaluate what seems to be wrong with people. The conventional categories
of symptoms are only that, categories of symptoms; they don't tell us
what has gone wrong. A boy who is "obsessive" displays certain
behaviors, but these behaviors don't tell us what it is that is actually
malfunctioning. The obsessive behavior itself is carried out very
skillfully, so it can't be the real problem (although it does lead to
many problems). Trying to turn it off is just fighting a control system
that wants it on. At least that is what the concept of a hierarchical
control organization would imply.
Fred Toates (Open University, Milton Keynes) wrote a book about his own
experiences with obsession: _Obsessional Thoughts & Behavior_ (1990);
London: Thorsens (an imprint of Harper-Collins). After the first half of
the book, which is a vivid description of the experiences of an
obsessive person, Toates goes through a long and thoughtful review of
the phenomenon and considers a multitude of possible explanations of it.
In Chapter 15, p. 139, he begins a section titled "A feedback
explanation of obsessional disorder?" In this section he cites, among
other people, Roger Pitman, which whom I corresponded for some time and
who wrote a paper (the one cited, that Pitman submitted to me for a
critique) on obsession, based on PCT. He, Toates, considers that one of
the more insightful contributions of feedback concepts is the idea of
control systems in conflict. The obsessive state of mind, he points out,
is one of great indecision, with the obvious obsessive behavior
consisting of a constant checking to see if the variable in question is
really under control (my words), and a constant and futile attempt to
avoid going through the useless checking yet again.
If there is really a conflict involved, it is useless to try to treat
the condition at the same level as the conflict. Whichever way you push,
one of the conflicted systems will push back or the aiding one will
relax, if you actually succeed in changing the behavior enough. The
approach that HPCT suggests is to try to identify the reference levels
in conflict, and then to use some method like the method of levels to
shift the person into a higher level of functioning, where the systems
are that are maintaining, and thus can change, the lower-level reference
signals. The idea is for the person to become aware of the conflict
instead of just acting it out from inside it. You and I have both seen
this method work under some circumstances; it might work with the boy as
well.
This is what I mean by giving PCT a chance. You have to discard, at
least temporarily, all the old ways of conceiving the problem and ask
what interpretations are suggested by PCT. It's a different way of
perceiving the person in front of you, even a different way of
perceiving progress. Under the conventional medical model, you attack
the symptom directly. Under PCT, you view the symptom only as evidence
of something else at work, the system or systems that set up the
situation in which the symptoms appear as a byproduct of the real
problem.
My objection to the use of drugs is very simple. If the drugs remove the
symptom, then it will not be necessary to reorganize at the higher
levels that were responsible for the symptom. The roots of the problem
will remain unchanged; if the drug is removed, they will again produce
problems, either the same one or a different one. And all the while that
the drug is in the system, it will be having many other effects of which
we know nothing and which we may fail to recognize as being created by
the drug -- in which case, of course, we will have to look for another
drug to counteract those effects, and so on without end. This is
probably the origin of the gross overmedication that goes on nowadays,
particularly with old people eating enough pills before breakfast to
spoil their appetites.
I hope you will get hold of Toates' book and read it. It raises what to
me is the most important question: what is it like to be this boy with
this obsession? It's only from his point of view that you can understand
the problem and see what might be done about it.
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Best to all,
Bill P.