[From: Bruce Nevin (Fri 931119 11:32:36 EST)]
Dan Miller (931118.1430) --
What are we doing when we
vent our pique (or our rage, or ...)? Venting, I would gather, is a
metaphor relating to letting off steam, depressurizing, or deflating.
In this sense are we bringing ourself back into some balance after
holding something in? I vent, you vent, we all do. What is it?
The metaphor was lively in the days when specific perceptions of steam
engines were familiar. There are many expressions reflecting this
metaphor. One of my favorites is "don't get all steamed up about it."
My mother's father had been captain of steam vessels (sailing vessels
earlier). They couldn't set out until they were all steamed up. When as
a child I heard her say "Boy, was he all steamed up about that!" I
imagined the only somewhat incongruous image of someone huffing and
puffing with agitation, in cold weather so that his breath steamed, and
maybe his glasses too. (It's only in recent years, reading to my
daughters, that I realized what the big bad wolf was doing when he
huffed, and consequently what it meant to go off in a huff--a linguistic
fossil of another sort.) Much of Freud's imagery is organized around the
steam metaphor, libido being an obvious analog. Hence the psychological
senses of the term "venting". I think we can safely set all of that
aside. The metaphor is misleading. Notions of venting one's anger have
been shown in recent years to be b.s.--having got angry, far from
"venting" unwanted "pressure", is just as apt to make it easier for one
to get angry again.
This is what I see going on here. What is brought into balance is not
some kind of psychic substance within oneself, but one's social
relations. The feeling of letting go something that had been held back
is genuine: the complainer has inhibited himself from speaking or
otherwise acting. The administrator listened politely, suffering the
intrusion of a fool. The administrator has done this more than he cares
to, and it has gotten a bit much to bear. In his complaint he announces
the social rules as they ought to be followed, and describes how the
people complained about violate those rules. Reaffirming these rules, he
gets confirmation from his peers of their rightness, and of the injustice
being done him. Possibly some of them may take action that directly or
indirectly may educate those who have done him injury, and whom for
politeness, or in keeping with his perception of his social role as
administrator, he does not feel enabled to challenge and educate
directly. In the case you describe, Dan, because the social rules are
tacit he is deprived of direct means: he cannot point to the rules and to
the violation and ask the violator to desist. Because the rules are
predicated on preserving a humane oasis for a fellow human being in a
taxing social role, doing so would seem to the intruder to be yet another
instance of the administrator abdicating his responsibility, a
responsibility that for the intruder already perhaps includes
accountability for any and possibly all actions and policies of "the
administration," whether or not this particular administrator had a role
in bringing them about. If his friends intervene on his behalf, their
actions too could backfire in the same way, to his political and social
detriment or to their own or both.
We could go from here easily to the problems experienced by someone who
moves from rank and file employment to management, and (in some ways more
interesting) the problems experienced by such a person's friends. As the
old union song goes, which side are you on? Can be daunting indeed.
The need for reaffirmation of reality is pretty basic. I recently have
read some summaries of experiments with noncontingent rewards in the book
by Paul Watzlawick that I quoted yesterday (_How real is real_). For
example (in work of Solomon Asch at Penn), a handful of subjects are
asked to compare a single line in one field with three various-sized
lines in another field and say which of the latter three is the same size
as the first. For a few trials all agree rapidly and settle in to yet
another boring experiment. Then on the next trial all but one of the
subjects agrees. The holdout double-checks, and reaffirms his view
somewhat diffidently. The same on subsequent trials. The dissenter
becomes increasingly disturbed. In successive experiments with different
subjects, a high proportion begin to deny their perceptions and go along
with the majority, who are of course all accomplices of the experimentor.
If only one member of the group contradicted him, the subject had
little difficulty maintaining his independence. As soon as the
opposition was increased to two persons, ... 13.6 percent [of
subjects went along with the majority]. With three opponents, the
failure curve went up to 31.8 percent, whereupon it flattened out,
and any further increase in the number of opponents raised the
percentage only to 36.8 percent.
Conversely, the presence of a supporting partner was a powerful help
in opposing the group pressure [sic]; under these conditions the
incorrect responses of the subject dropped to one fourth of the error
rate mentioned above.
It is notoriously difficult to appreciate the impact of an event like
an earthquake before having actually experienced one. The effect of
the Asch experiment is comparable. When the subjects were let in on
the scheme, they reported that during the test they had experienced
varying degrees of emotional discomfort, from moderate anxiety to
something akin to depersonalization. Even those who refused to
submit to group opinion and continued to trust their own perceptions
usually did so with nagging worries that they might, after all, be
wrong. A typical statement was: "To me it seems I'm right, but my
reason tells me I'm wrong, because I doubt that so many people could
be wrong and I alone right."
Others resorted to very typical ways of rationalizing or explaining
away the state of disinformation that undermined their world view:
they either transferred the fear to an organic defect ("I began to
doubt that my vision was right"), or they decided there was some
exceptional complication (e.g., an optical illusion), or they became
so suspicious that they refused to believe the final explanation,
maintaining that it was itself part of the experiment and therefore
not to be trusted. (Watzlawick, op.cit. 86-87)
Watzlawick points out that an essentially parallel social situation is
found in patterns of communication and noncommunication in families of
people diagnosed with mental disorders. In families, the dissenter is a
child and the others who are denying his perceptions are not anonymous
co-subjects of an experiment but known others on whom the dissenter must
rely for his well being. Watzlawick also points out that if the social
and communicative aspects of the experiment were left out of account one
would be justified in diagnosing the compliant one-third of the subject
population as suffering from cognitive and affective disorders. At an
earlier point he sets up a parallel to Milton Erikson's pioneering use of
what he called a confusion technique in inducing hypnosis. He summarizes
some other samples of the large literature on noncontingent reward.
Clearly there are controlled perceptions being disturbed and the
disturbances resisted in these experiments. It appears that the subject
is required to choose which of two error signals to ignore and suffer.
For the one-third who choose to ignore or discount error in their
physical senses (visual perception of relative line length, here), what
perceptions are they thereby enabled to control? Of what perceptions do
the other two-thirds lose control, to their evident discomfort?
Mary Powers 931118 --
(To Martin)
We went round and round on the net
a few months ago about the specialness of social interaction and
how PCT couldn't possibly handle that complex phenomenon.
I can't know whether or not you intended this attribution to apply to
me--maybe it will be clear when (if) I finally catch up on back CSG mail
--but since no one else can either I explicitly dissociate myself from it.
I have not claimed and do not claim that PCT is unable to handle these
phenomena.
Bruce
bn@bbn.com