[From: Bruce Nevin (Mon 931129 11:55:21 EST)]
Questions of PCT ethics again emerge.
( Rick Marken (931125.1200) ) --
Bruce is blaming Annie's problems on Mrs. Corrie and I'm blaming them on
higher level systems in Annie herself.
I don't blame Mrs. Corrie, though that is suggested by the storyteller
describing her as a "small, witch-like woman" in a kind of gingerbread
house. I tried to be careful to say nothing blaming her, or Annie, or
Fannie, or their visitors. Perhaps I did not succeed. "Saying" involves
at least two participants, after all, and I can control the perceptions
of only one.
Mrs. Corrie is only doing the best she knows how to maintain control. As
she perceives the world, she must arrange for her daughters to feel
obligated to please her, and (lest they should thereby gain power over
her, as she deludedly believes they might) she must arrange that the means for
pleasing her should be paradoxically opposed, so that the girls can't actually
carry them out to please her and must suffer conflict that they cannot
resolve. This is of course what pleases her, as it turns out, hence the
self-sealing properties of the pattern of communication. For indications
of further ramifications, see R. D. Laing, _Knots_.
Of course all of this is due to higher-level systems in Mrs. Corrie, and
in Annie, and in Fannie, controlling perceptions that each "has" of their
shared environment and especially of each other, each other's actions,
and the meanings of each other's actions. I refer here not only to
perceptions that might be tested scientifically and verified or refuted,
then, but morespecially to higher-level perceptions of what such things
mean.
Annie is controlling a perception that she and her sister must please her
mother. The overtly available/offered means for pleasing her -- behave
in a grownup, helpful way and offer the children some gingerbread, behave
in a dutiful, dependent way and wait for mother to say what to do with
her gingerbread -- turn out to be mutually contradictory in quick
succession. Weeping in frustration appears to please mother. This has
happened before. It is a familiar pattern. The experience of confusion,
perhaps unreality, detachment, blanking out, fog setting in -- various
subjective experiences are reported during conflict and reorganization of
this sort, or during hypnotic induction -- also is familiar. The
sequence of experiences is normal, has been normal as long as Annie and
Fannie can remember. It has never occurred to them that anyone's life
might be different. Annie is only doing the best she knows how to
maintain control. Like Ed Ford (931126.1000) "I couldn't agree more that
Annie is responsible for her own internal world." Also Fannie and Mrs.
Corrie.
No matter what happens in Annie's environment,
which is that from which she creates her perceptions
(which includes her perceptions at her systems concept
level), her decisions or choices must be in harmony within
the rest of her HPCT or she's in conflict. That's just
the way a living control system works.
I am describing a situation in which the alternative outcome is usual for
Annie: her decisions or choices are not in harmony within the rest of her
perceptual control hierarchy, and she is in conflict. But this outcome
itself is means for controlling a higher-level perception of her
relationship and pattern of interaction with her mother. Because of this
successful control (pleasing mother by demonstrating one's powerlessness
to please her and demonstrating that one feels helpless and conflicted
about that), the chronic error due to conflict may result in
reorganization, but any reorganization outcome that reduces the success
of control through the whole, conflict-defined interaction is not
accepted and reorganization continues. This means that Annie is more or
less continually in a state of reorganization, none of whose outcomes
that might appear helpful from our point of view as outside observers is
in fact acceptable within her perceptual control hierarchy, since such
outcomes would resolve the conflict. And it is precisely Annie's
inability to resolve the conflict that is pleasing to Mrs. Corrie, or
that results in anything like expressions of pleasure for Annie to
perceive and control. At the least, it is these expressions that bring
the current run-through of the pattern to a close. Annie and Fannie are
fed and clothed, what have they to complain about? The social worker can
see nothing amiss, although the girls do act out in sometimes
unpredictable and even bizarre ways. Perhaps they are not too bright.
They seem to be kind of tuned out, as if they were not quite all there.
They don't do so well in school, and haven't been able to establish any
relationships with other children. It's as well their future is assured
by their mother owning that little bake shop.
The beauty of HPCT is that in spite of all that happens to
us, including what is done to us, it is all perceived as
energy and it only takes on meaning or becomes
understandable according to how we create that meaning
inside our own perceptual system. And that is the key to
understanding Annie's problems and Mrs. Corrie's
influence.
Yes, indeed. How does a person involved in such a pattern of
communication create the meanings of her experiences? Are they likely to
be the same as the meanings assigned by the customers in the shop?
The reason there are such lengthy discussions on this net
about certain topics is not that people aren't being clear
as to what they are saying, the problem is that the
clarity is in the world of the sender, not the receiver.
It's the aligning of our individual HPCTs that's so darn
hard to accomplish. And also so frustrating.
Couldn't have said it better. Empathy is not always so obvious as it
seems. And I certainly do make mistakes, as when Martin bailed me out on
formants. Please don't understand me quite so fast, Rick.
( CHUCK TUCKER 931129 ) --
I think the we will all agree that Annie's problems are of her
own making as are everyone's from the PCT view. But the issue
that seems to be lost in making this point (as we have done
about 24 times on this Net) is the matter of joint or shared
responsibility.
If you say, "Yes, I share some responsibility"
then I would say that Annie's mother also shares that responsi-
bility. I don't think that this is an enormous ethical problem
but I do think that it is consistent with PCT in spite of its
apparent inconsistency. The simple "demo" is the rubber-band
exercise when I can get another's finger to "spell" a word (or
be in a circle, square, symbol) when I know that he/she is
controlling for keeping the "knot over the spot." I am, in part,
responsible for the location of the other's finger; a joint
responsibility (no pun intended).
This demo indicates how manipulation is possible and exists. Leadership,
according to Eisenhower, is getting another to do what you want done
because they want to do it. (Wasn't it you who quoted that, Dag?)
Manipulation is getting another to do what they want in such a way as to
do also (or even instead) what you want done. Sustained manipulation
can't work without complicity by the one manipulated. I suggest that
Annie is complicit in her mother's manipulation of her. This is after
all what pleases her mother--or, behind that, it is what relieves her
mother's terror.
Pamela Travers, the person who wrote Mary Poppins, did not get the idea
of Mrs. Corrie and Annie and Fannie from Gregory Bateson or from Paul
Watzlawick. Nor does Jules Feiffer get ideas for his cartoons from study
of such writers. Nor are these works popular because of drawing from
such authorities (who are not authorities at all in the "establishment").
They get these ideas from their experience of like situations, and their
readers also perceive something familiar. They've all been there. We've
all been there. This stuff happens. I have suggested how PCT, with no
change to the theory, might account for it. Might account for it in
terms of each participant controlling her own perceptions.
Over the weekend at my brother-in-law's house, I saw a Feiffer cartoon
from last Christmas in a saved-over copy of the NYT Magazine. In panel
1, "The Gramps who stole Christmas" has pulled the track layout from its
very large carton and is assembling it, explaining to the dismayed boy
how "the real pleasure is in putting it together yourself." Next, "The
Granny who stole Christmas" holds the boy on her lap, saying "Now give me
a REAL kiss, that's not a real kiss." Then dad, holding a tie, says to
him "The Christmas present I really wanted was an A in math." I forget
what Mom tells him in the 4th panel. In the last panel, "The carton that
saved Christmas," the adults are kneeling, peering into the open end of
that very large carton, whence emerges a voice: "Not until you give the
Black Knight the password!"
Reorganization? Where does play come from and why do we do it?
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An aside in Ed's post, quoted above: I didn't quite know what to do with
what appears to be an assertion that since all ex-cons in your class
agreed firmly that people are responsible for what they do, it must be
so. Perhaps you didn't mean quite that? I agree with the general
sentiment--with a caveat just below --but it does not follow that just
because we agree it is so. Does it?
The caveat is that we can't very reliably be accountable for what we do
since we don't control what we do, only what we perceive. What you
perceive me as having done may not be at all what I was doing. Or is it?
Am I responsible for unforeseen side effects? Here we come for example
to the assessing of intent in legal judgements. Solomon assessed the
intent of the two mothers. The Test.
It seems to me that a great deal of the social education of children
concerns side effects that they must learn to foresee and control, and
that apologies very frequently have to do with unintended meanings,
though this is greatly complicated of course by the fact that control is
not to be identified with awareness. And then there is the question of
different standards. On this hinges D.H. Lawrence's definition of sin:
if you know it's wrong but do it anyway, it's a sin; if you don't know
it's wrong, how can it be a sin? I wonder if canon law recognizes a
category of innocent sin. Some pre-Christian pagans were in Dante's
Hades, some in Purgatory.
But this last question leads away from the PCT-relevant thread, which I
take to be not a priori moral categories but rather the question, to what
degree we are accountable for our behavioral outputs, which after all are
unintended byproducts of perceptual control.
Bruce
bn@bbn.com